“Fragile Territories” is a laser and sound art installation by Berlin-based musician Robert Henke which ran from November 2012 to January 2013 at Le Lieu Unique center for contemporary arts and music in Nantes, France.

As seen in this video the installation, three years in the making, features four fast moving laser beams that project evolving light patterns on a 30-meter wide wall in a dark room. The artist describes other aspects of the piece:

Sounds – transformed recordings of a piano – fill the room, sometimes in sync with the visual aspects and sometimes running simply in parallel. Whilst everything is floating and happening in rather long intervals, a constant black shadow is moving in front of the projection, from left to right, every 4.2 seconds, like a giant blade of a windmill, a negative object that contrasts the bright projection by muting it where it appears. It is not only obscuring the image but also dampening the sounds at its current position and emitting a low frequency noise itself.

photo via Le Lieu Unique

More details about “Fragile Territories” are in the English version of the exhibition brochure (pdf).

image via Le Lieu Unique

Trained as a hardware engineer, Robert Henke has made electronic music for two decades under the moniker Monolake and his own name. He is also an important contributor to Ableton Live, the popular music software which was created by Gerhard Behles his original Monolake collaborator. Despite the fact Monolake is named after a lake in Nevada, Henke hails from Munich Germany and is based in Berlin.

In Spring 2013 Henke is teaching algorithmic composition of electronic music at Stanford University and performing live across the US. Here’s a great interview with Henke and more of his music.

photo via roberthenke.com

“The Singing Ringing Tree” is a musical sculpture near Burnley in the North West of England built by architects Tonkin Liu. It was designed in 2004 and completed at the end of 2006. It is one of four landmark art projects called “Panopticons” built in the early 2000′s in Lancashire. The film above was directed by Zsolt Sándor with sound by A Man Called Adam.

photo by Mid Pennine Arts

The tree is constructed of stacked pipes of varying lengths, orientated to lean into the directions of the prevailing wind. As the wind passes through the different lengths of pipe, it plays different chords. Each time you sit under the tree, looking out through the wind, you will hear a different song.

photo by Mid Pennine Arts

photo by Mid Pennine Arts

The tree won a 2007 award for architectural excellence from the Royal Institute of British Architects. As part of the project’s launch local kids and young adults wrote fanciful stories inspired by the sculpture.

photo by Mid Pennine Arts

The Halo in Haslingden, Rossendale was the fourth and final Panopticon to be constructed opening in September 2007:

photo by Peter Hudson

The Bay Lights Grand Lighting Ceremony video via Xconomy

History will show that on March 5th, 2013 San Francisco’s reliably temperamental weather patterns greeted the debut of The Bay Lights public art project with a brief rainstorm. Which is wholly appropriate. San Francisco is not a fair weather city, so any art planning to last years on the the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge better be designed to handle the elements.

Opening night video by Khuong Truong

The rain lasted a few hours, just long enough to frame the official ceremony featuring San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and (former mayor) California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom. Undeterred, at 9pm Pacific time they flipped the switch (err, pushed the laptop key) to boot up the 25,000 LED lights that comprise Leo Villareal‘s monumental public art piece. San Franciscans gathered along the piers north of the bridge and in numerous suggested viewing spots to see the first burst of LED white and the steadily evolving patterns that followed. It will turn on at dusk daily for 2 years.

Bay Lights is installed on the north side of the western span of the bridge (attached with 60,000 zip ties) between San Francisco and Yerba Buena Island. The project has been privately funded, and is still raising the final quarter of their $8 Million goal. It is estimated the lights will use only $30 of electricity a day or $11,000 over 2 years.

Photo by Michael Dillon

Artist Leo Villareal drew on his background in sculpture and computer programming for both the installation design and the algorithmically-generated dynamic light patterns. He cited the monumental works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and the generative art works of Brian Eno amongst his influences as well as his time attending the Burning Man festival in the 1990′s where he also programmed his first light sculpture.

Photo by Matt Mullenweg

At a press conference earlier in the day Mayor Lee said he could see the current two-year permit being extended for some time. San Francisco has a habit of extending public art beyond its initial sunset date–the Defenestration building was expected to be up less than a year and after a recent renovation has been there 15 years.

We first covered The Bay Lights in 2011 and last featured it about a month ago. Here’s a timelapse video featuring the changing patterns of Bay Lights in action, seen over San Francisco’s Market Street from a test around that time:

At one point within the first hour the lights were on, Bay Lights’ evolving constellation of white LEDs was augmented by a cluster of moving red and blue lights. No, it wasn’t a patriotic American display, just a pair of SFPD cars that had some urgent business on the bridge. It just goes to show that unpredictable elements will always turn up in public art.

You can tune into a live feed of the Bay Lights at any time. Hint: nothing really happens until it’s dark.

Live streaming video from acmelive

The SF MusicTech Summit XII takes place on February 19, 2013 at Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco. For many years the SF MusicTech Summit series has tracked the overlapping industries of music and technology from every possible angle.

These events are attended twice a year by bands, music labels, coders, CEOs, streaming music services, app developers, marketers, instrument makers, journalists and everyone in between. This year’s list of speakers and panelists includes representatives of companies like BitTorrent, Rdio, and Austin City Limits Live; writers from Techcrunch and hypebot.com; and artists DJ Young Guru and Zoë Keating amongst many others.

Below Michael Franti of Spearhead performs at the most recent SF MusicTech Summit.

Photo by Michael O’Donnell

This trailer for the 2008 roller derby documentary Hell On Wheels covers the sport’s unlikely 21st Century revival. But there’s an even more surprising story of how this modern all-female, full-contact sport has its roots in dance marathons of the 1920s which were endurance competitions for couples that sometimes lasted a thousand hours.

Those live events were also a predecessor of contemporary reality TV as they mixed celebrities with regular people and drew huge interest by offering thousands in cash prizes during the Great Depression. They also profited their organizers, grossing millions each year. Here’s more details on this fad of the 1920′s and 30′s:

Contestants and spectators alike bought into the staged excitement and competition. Spectators could cheer, make wagers and root for their favorite team, even interacting with the dancers, chatting with them and throwing money. Contestants were enticed by the potential for fame and fortune, from prizes of several thousand dollars to performing contracts, and were fueled by the audiences’ support and applause. Like professional wrestling, the contests were fixed, but both sides bought into the simulated reality of it and participated heartily, provoking each other and egging each other on. The newest episodic entertainment, spectators would return day after day to follow their heroes and see more drama unfold.

In 1935, former film promoter and cinema owner Leo Seltzer was the first to put the coupled competitors on wheels, and so dance marathons evolved into (the term Seltzer trademarked) “Roller Derbies“. The debut event drew a crowd of 20,000 in Chicago. Roller derby historian Jim Fitzpatrick gives more details about those co-ed derby marathons in this interview:

For a roller derby research marathon: visit “roller derby” on How Stuff Works and see lots more roller derby videos here. And watch this documentary for fantastic details on early dance marathons and roller derbies, if you don’t mind it’s own slow-pace…

“The Violence of Mexican Drug Cartels” is beautifully diabolical, an impeccably designed animation telling the troubling tale of the current Mexican drug cartel war and how the United States is tied to the violence.

“Tens of thousands are being murdered, and over a million are being forced to flee their homes. U.S. laws and policy play a major role in the conflict’s violence. This video is about understanding the complexities of the war and why it is happening.”

Designed by ishothim and published by Visual.ly.

via Boing Boing

Syd Barrett, the original lead singer for rock band Pink Floyd was born 66 years ago this week. This clip from May 1967 shows the band on the BBC television show “Look of The Week”, where Austrian interviewer Hans Keller, who had “grown up in the string quartet” says he finds the Floyd sound too loud after hearing them play “Astronomy Domine” live. Here’s how the exchange is described on Wikipedia:

Keller was generally puzzled by, or even contemptuous of, the group and its music, repeatedly returning to the criticism that they were too loud for his taste. He ended his interview segment with the band by saying the words “My verdict is that it is a little bit of a regression to childhood – but, after all, why not?”

Keller’s commentary throughout is laughably un-hip and blind to the emerging culture of the 1960s, but there is some truth in that last line. Syd was destined to end up in a rather child-like state due to his prodigious experimentation with psychedelics and other drugs. Less than a year after this appearance Syd was out of the band, effectively replaced by David Gilmour, due to his increasingly unpredictable behavior and reduced creative output.

Barrett released a few solo albums after leaving Pink Floyd, but none of it rivals the heights of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Floyd’s first album, on which Syd wrote most of the songs. He lived largely as a recluse until he passed away in 2006. But his legacy is immense, not only from the band he co-founded. Amongst those who have acknowledged his influence are Paul McCartney, Marc Bolan, Brian Eno, The Damned, XTC, Tangerine Dream, and Robyn Hitchcock.

photo by Mick Rock via Wikipedia

The CLOUDS project is a documentary by James George and Jonathan Minard about current hacker-art practices. It features interviews with thirty artists, curators, designers, & critics and was created with an open-source software library called RGBDToolkit in the RGBD 3D cinema format. CLOUDS software gives viewers the ability to chart different paths through a database of footage via keywords or search queries rather than having a single static version of the film.

The interview subjects in CLOUDS include Bruce Sterling, Casey Reas, Daniel Shiffman, Diederick Huijbers, Elliot Woods, Golan Levin, Greg Borenstein, Jer Thorp, Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, Jessica Rosenkrantz, Joel Gethin Lewis, Josh Nimoy, Julia Kaganskiy, Julian Oliver, Karolina Sobecka, Karsten “Toxi” Schmidt, Kyle Chayka, Kyle McDonald, Lindsay Howard, Marcus Wendt, Marius Watz, Nick Fox-Gieg, Paola Antonelli, Philip Whitfield, Rachel Binx, Regine Debatty, Satoru Higa, Shantell Martin, Sofy Yuditskaya, Theodore Watson, Vera Glahn, and Zachary Lieberman.

The CLOUDS Kickstarter is fully funded and will end on Jan 8, 2013.

This 1978 footage shows the great no-respect-getting comedian Rodney Dangerfield (aka Jack Roy aka Jacob Cohen) doing his signature schtick in front of a 16-piece band who play after his punchlines, like a drummer doing rimshots.

Via Wikipedia, here’s some great trivia about the origin of the “Rodney Dangerfield” name and character:

He took the name Rodney Dangerfield, which had been used as the comical name of a faux cowboy star by Jack Benny on his radio program at least as early as the December 21, 1941, broadcast and later as a pseudonym by Ricky Nelson on the TV program The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The Benny character, who also received little or no respect from the outside world, served as a great inspiration to Dangerfield while he was developing his own comedy character.

You were wondering what The Price Is Right game show was like 50 years ago, right? Now you know: this clip from New Years Day 1962 shows a very different game where players guess the cost of expensive jewelry instead of a box of Rice-a-Roni. This first version of the show debuted in 1956 and was hosted by Bill Cullen with announcer Don Pardo (later famous as the voice of Saturday Night Live).

The final round has a Jolly Roger Ice Cream truck up for grabs instead of “a new car” which became the pinnacle of prizes on the Bob Barker-hosted “New Price Is Right” starting in 1972. The clip also includes ads for show sponsors Newport cigarettes (“the soothing coolness of menthol”) and Anacin (“Fast fast incredibly fast relief”).

Art by Greg Harrison

Everyone knows the song “Happy Birthday to You“–the Guinness Book of World Records says it’s the most recognized song in English. Most of us sing it several times a year, for free. So it may surprise you that Warner Chappel music owns the rights to the song and charges thousands of dollars for its use in public. They make $2 million a year in royalties from TV shows and filmmakers. But now WFMU and the Free Music Archive are trying to set birthdays to music anew, for free.

The Birthday Song Contest seeks a few new Happy Birthday songs that are simple and catchy, with great earworm potential that can be sung in restaurants, bowling alleys, and even in TV shows and movies – free of charge.

It’s a great way to say Happy Tenth Birthday to Creative Commons. Songwriters can add their new birthday ditties to a national repository of alternate Birthday songs. Submissions are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license. The deadline for submitting songs is Jan 13 at 11:59pm ET. The judges include Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Coulton, and members of Deerhoof and Yo La Tengo. They will select 3 winners to be announced on 1/29/2013. More info here.

The song was originally written in 1893 by two sisters, but wasn’t copyrighted until 1935. If you want to go academically deep on its copyright history, check this paper. The video below highlights replacement birthday songs used on TV and film over the years as they try to save a few thousand bucks by not singing the song that everyone knows.

Happy Birthday Alternatives in Film and Television from Free Music Archive on Vimeo.

In November 2011 legendary rocker Bob Mould played a show in LA with some friends. Now a year later there’s a Kickstarter to fund a DVD of that concert. The funding deadline is Saturday December 22.

The venue was The Walt Disney Concert Hall and these are the friends who 2000+ lucky people got to see Bob jam with:

Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters), Britt Daniel (Spoon), Ryan Adams, No Age, Craig Finn and Tad Kubler (The Hold Steady), and Margaret Cho with Grant Lee Phillips will perform songs from Bob’s catalog.

The set covered Mould’s entire career including both his 1990s band Sugar and 1980s hardcore punk icons Hüsker Dü. Mould played live with No Age and with a band including Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters). Margaret Cho recounts her experience attending and performing at the concert. Here’s Hüsker Dü in 1983 rocking the fuck out with Bob on vocals:

This Newsreel of the 1965 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade features cast members from The Munsters and their custom “Munster Koach” hot rod built by George Barris. The “Koach” was a modified 1926 Ford Model T with a custom hearse body. It cost nearly $20,000 (a lot of money back then). Thus continued, with a little help from the monsters next door, a tradition of holiday spectacle in New York City dating back to 1924.

Photo from Macy’s, Inc. Photo Gallery

The first Macy’s Parade in New York City took place in 1924, featuring live animals, clowns, cowboys, and Macy’s employees in costume. It drew 250,000 people (a lot of people back then). Today more than 3.5 million attend the parade live and more than 50 million watch it on television. But the very first Macy’s Thanksgiving parade was arranged by founder Rowland H Macy in 1854 in Haverhill, Massachusetts the location of his very first dry goods store.

Live animals made way for giant floating animals in 1927 when Felix the Cat became the first of many many cartoon characters to appear as balloons in the parade. In 1928 they first filled the balloons with helium and released them into the air at the end of the parade. Unfortunately they all soon popped loudly above the crowd. The next they were made durable enough to float around for a few days after being released, and had a mailing address on them so they could be returned (in exchange for a gift from Macy’s).

Photo from Macy’s, Inc. Photo Gallery

Mickey Mouse debuted in 1934. This remarkable 1935 British newsreel shows his buddy Donald in the parade, too. Get ready for a very un-PC representation of a Native American and a short bit at the end of President FDR carving the turkey.

Macy’s hired German-American puppeteer Tony Sarg to design the balloons in-house. He oversaw the creation of original balloons like the “sea-serpent” below. Sarg worked on the parade through the 1930s and also designed Macy’s elaborate animated holiday window displays. There’s a really cool children’s book about Sarg. More photos of the sea serpent here.

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Photos via the Nantucket Historical Association

This 1939 footage of the parade features characters from Disney and the Wizard of Oz. See our previous post for more details about this rediscovered home movie. 1939 was also the first year the parade was on television broadcast on New York’s W2XBS as an experimental broadcast with Tony Sarg as a host.

Cartoons weren’t the only celebrities immortalized as giant helium balloons. Here’s the inflated Eddie Cantor of 1940:

Here’s a treasure trove of historical parade photos from the Macy’s website:

Parade photos from Macy’s, Inc. Photo Gallery

In this 1954 8mm home movie shot near Times Square you’ll see Felix the Cat still in the show 27 years after his debut.

There are many more videos of recent years on YouTube. But that’s not always a good thing. Do you remember the live Rickroll we blogged a few years back? Or this horror from 1984 when Tim Conway and The Cabbage Patch Kids gave us this utterly forgettable musical number.

As an American and New York City icon the` parade has featured in lots of media over the years, most famously the 1947 film Miracle On 34th Street. On the small screen it figures in episodes of Family Guy, Friends, and Seinfeld amongst others. Macy’s celebrated their 150th anniversary in 2008 with a commercial showcasing the brand in popular culture…

What’s next? Well according to the Hollywood Reporter there may be a feature film about the parade in the works.

“We’re aiming to make a four-quadrant, family-friendly film somewhere in that Night At The Museum, Elf sweet spot,” Glassgold says.

The duo have begun meeting with writers and are exploring various concepts, even one where the floats spring to life.

To convince the department store to bless the project, Glassgold and Brothers commissioned artist Joel Venti, who storyboarded Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and Thor, to help with the presentation, which won over Macy’s execs.

“We are always searching for the next Miracle on 34th Street,” says Macy’s senior vp Robin Hall.

The article is from 2011, but this IMDB listing suggests there could be something to it: Untitled Macy’s Parade Project (2013).

The Long Now Foundation is building a new event space at the site of their current museum / store in San Francisco’s historic Fort Mason. Their Help us build it… video announces details of the project including design by Because We Can, a fundraising distillation collaboration with St George Spirits and unique bottles by Adams & Chittenden. Today they posted more video clips with additional details about the design of both the space and spirits, some of which you’ll find below.

[We] have designed a salon space that will not only house our prototypes, and a hand curated library, but also serve locally roasted coffee by day, and inspired cocktails by night. The goal is to build a social place to help make long-term thinking more automatic and common rather than difficult and rare.

Dedicated to fostering long-term thinking in an age of fractured attention spans, Long Now is best known for building a 10,000 year clock. The Foundation’s name comes via Brian Eno, who sits on their Board and was their first speaker. Their work has inspired a Neil Stephenson novel, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is now funding their clock’s construction in Texas. Full disclosure, I’ve helped out with this project, from advising on their “bottle keep” spirit club to picking juniper berries for their new gin. My lady works for the Foundation, so I’ve got a lot of insight on what makes this project special.

Long Now bottle stand and gin prototypes at St George Spirits / photo by Jillian Northrup

In this video, from footage for a forthcoming documentary short about the salon redesign, Jillian Northrup of Because We Can talks about the design challenge of a bar that is not primarily a commercial space.

Here’s Lance Winters of St George Spirits talking about his approach to crafting a special gin for Long Now using juniper berries picked from their property in Nevada and how his creations are an “olefactory archive” of a place and time.

Lance and team created the line of Hangar One vodkas, and have since moved on with St George Spirits to smaller run, hand-crafted spirits including a line of distinctive gins. They’re creating two unique products for Long Now:

St George Spirits in Alameda has created two exclusive spirits for us. Each one is truly a distillation of long-term thinking. The first is an aromatic gin made with juniper berries harvested by hand among the five-thousand year old bristlecones from our site in eastern Nevada.

The other spirit is a whiskey with a specially tailored grain bill. It will be fermented and distilled in such a way that it'll be delicious without aging, and grow more intricate and complex with every year. We will bottle a small amount, each year for the next 15 years, allowing you to taste its annual progression.

Photo by Jillian Northrup

Long Now gin and whiskey will only be available at their Fort Mason space. The redesign construction is funded in part by donors who join Long Now’s Founders Spirit clubs modeled after Japanese bottle keeps. Each bottle that is purchased ($1500 for the gin, $25,000 for 15 years of whiskey) stays at Long Now with the donor’s name on it, ready for when they visit. This approach fits Long Now’s mission of heightening people’s attention to the passage of time.

Juniper berries are the most distinctive ingredient in gin, and the Long Now gin features remarkable berries harvested from property they own on Mount Washington in eastern Nevada at elevations of up to 11,000 feet. Here are photos I shot there including a closeup of a juniper bush rife with tiny berries, and a several-thousand-year-old bristlecone pine tree:

Photos of Nevada by Mikl-em

Here Lance talks about the unusual flavors and characteristics of the juniper berries from Long Now’s property.

Long Now has additional videos about the project here.

Back in 2006 Laughing Squid’s primary tentacle Scott Beale shot photos of the opening of Long Now’s space at Fort Mason. It hasn’t changed much since. Here are a few “before-and-future” comparisons of the redesign with 2006.

Long Now public space “Before-and-future” (front room with Orrery):

Above: photo by Scott Beale of Long Now’s space in 2006. Below: similar view of Because We Can’s planned redesign.

Long Now public space “Before-and-future” (back room, two perspectives):

Above: photo by Scott Beale of Long Now’s space in 2006. Below: similar view of Because We Can’s planned redesign.

Above: the bar viewed in the opposite direction (via Because We Can). Below: how it looked in 2006 (by Scott Beale)

When will the new space open? No date is set but, at least relatively to the 10,000 year clock, it won’t be long now.

Alexander Rose from Long Now and Lance Winters of St George Spirits. / photo by Jillian Northrup.

Here are all of Scott’s photos from the day the space opened at Fort Mason in 02006:

And more images of the Because We Can interior design:

All videos by Sustainability Media / Shoulder High Productions

Who’s Who & What’s What in the Books of Dr. Seuss is an index from A (Letter of the alphabet central to a question–in The Cat’s Quizzer) to zZZ (Sound made by Grand Duke Wilfred’s arrows–in The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins) to the works of Dr. Seuss (aka Theodor Geisel). Published by Dartmouth College Library in 2000, it is available free online.

The book was compiled by Edward Connery Lathem. Lathem served as Dartmouth’s Dean of Libraries, Librarian of the College, and was a personal friend of the author. Theordor Geisel matriculated at Dartmouth, graduating in 1925. He was editor-in-chief of Dartmouth’s humor magazine, The Jack-O-Lantern.

This extensive guide commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Theodor Seuss Geisel’s graduation from Dartmouth College.

Lathem also wrote The Beginnings of Dr. Seuss – An Informal Reminiscence published in 2004 which is likewise available in the Dartmouth Digital Collection online.

Earlier this year Dartmouth re-named their School of Medicine after Audrey and Theodor Geisel.

photos by Mikl-em

Burlesque dancer Georgia Sothern, nicknamed “The Human Dynamo”, performs her signature frenetic dancing striptease which seems a bit awkward today but was probably much more titillating back in 1942.

More from Pin Curl magazine:

Born in Atlanta, Georgia picked her name on the spot in Phil Rosenberg’s office and in her nervousness, forgot the ‘u’ in Sothern, and so the spelling stuck. Her unique style of whirling dervish striptease was also born out of nervousness, during her very first performance and this jazz age baby rode it all the way to the bank, eventually having a signature tune written for her, “Hold that Tiger.” Ann Corio wrote, “The mere sight of this red hot red-headed temptress tossing her hips in fantastic abandon to the wild music of the band caught up everybody in its spell…the audience was almost as exhausted watching as Georgia was performing.” Sometimes she would get so caught up in her exuberant dance steps that she would end up taking off and putting on her clothing several times during a number, leading one fan to remark, “She strips just like she had dynamite for lunch.”

The clip is from the Broadway musical Star And Garter produced by Michael Todd which also featured Gypsy Rose Lee.

image via Dollhouse Bettie

Sothern’s stage career began in 1922 and spanned more than half a century. She started in Vaudeville theaters at the age of 12 and went on to produce her own touring variety shows which she headlined before ultimately retiring in 1977. She wrote a book about her life as an exotic dancer Georgia: My Life in Burlesque.

image via Pin Curl

video via B Cinema TV

via Burleskateer

We posted recently about Theodor Geisel’s advertising work in the early 1940s. But the artist better known as Dr. Seuss also made art while serving as a captain in the U.S. Army during World War II. He worked on training films and informative documents like this pamphlet to educate GIs about malaria, which features the Anopheles Mosquito, entitled “This is Ann … she drinks blood!“.

Some of the art and content of the pamphlet were also used in a November 8, 1943 Department of War “Newsmap”:

The WWII newsmaps are fascinating documents…

Newsmaps were published by the Special Service Division, Army Service Forces, War Department. The issues were prepared and distributed by the Army Orientation Course. One standard feature that appears on all maps is a short textual summary of key events titled “The War Fronts,” that includes descriptions of war-related events, mostly by geographic area, such as China, Russia, Tunisia, South Pacific, Aleutians, Wake, etc.

Newsmaps were produced each Monday from 1942-1946 and usually featured a map of the current war fronts on one side and a poster about a war-related topic on the other. They were distributed by the Army and Navy to primarily military installations and government & civilian groups working on War Department projects.

Some newsmap posters featured photos and covered topics like “Iran, rich land poor land” (1946) or “The atomic question” (1945). Others featured artists (typically uncredited) illustrating subjects like “Gas” (1943) or the “Merrie Melodies” styled “A Mournful Melody (A Dud Dood It Again – And Watch Out for Booby Traps)” (1943).

Via the infectious disease history blog Contagions and NPR.

“Art Remixer” Thomas Robson says he “develops collision art to confront received aesthetics & critically re-appraise imagery in a visually saturated world.” Whatever he says, the stuff is freaking cool. He has worked in graphic design and in interactive design for the web & TV for the BBC. But it seems like he’s more interested now in coloring outside the lines:

It is remarkable how diverse his work is in various series like Landscape with Data, Made in China and Luxe Art (below) with styles and materials including collage, photography, computer graphics and even ceramics.

Exploring attacking the boundaries between graphic design & fine art by subverting and re-contextualising imagery with dramatic visual interventions.

The Skullduggery series is all kinds of awesome.

His other series include “Fine Art Remix With Chalk & Pastels“:

And the Origins series:

There’s lots more on his site, and in this feature on Robson’s work at Fussed Magazine.

Duelity consists of two animations showing different interpretations of the origin of life on Earth. One side is Genesis told in modern business and technology-centric terms while the other is a biblically styled portrayal of the Big Bang.

Duelity is a split-screen animation that tells both sides of the story of Earth’s origins in a dizzying and provocative journey through the history and language that marks human thought.

The film was made in 2007 by Boca (aka Marcos Ceravolo) and Ryan Uhrich as a project at Vancouver Film School. It won an Adobe Design Achievement Award in 2008, amongst other awards. You can view or download the two animations individually or together at duelity.net.

A clip from Boy and Bicycle (1965) the 25-minute black and white film that marked the debut of director Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Gladiator). Made for £65 with a borrowed 16mm camera, it starred his younger brother Tony Scott who also became a major Hollywood director. The entire film is viewable online at the Arts Council England‘s site The Space.

On Sunday night the world learned the sad news that Tony Scott had committed suicide. Scott studied to be a painter before joining his brother Ridley’s successful production company. After establishing himself directing commercials Tony’s breakthrough was the 1983 vampire thriller The Hunger starring David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve. That led to directing the blockbuster Top Gun which made Tom Cruise a star and propelled Tony to the top echelon of the movie business.

In all Tony Scott made 16 feature films, most recently Unstoppable (2010) and was active in recent years directing commercials and producing for film and television.

photo by myETVmedia

Here’s more on Boy and Bicycle:

Opening in Scott’s own teenage bedroom, Boy and Bicycle begins with the camera representing the point of view of the boy (played by Scott’s younger brother Tony, who would also become a film-maker) as he wakes up and looks around his room, thinking about the day ahead. The film then follows the boy as he decides instead to play truant and visits various locations around the seaside town on his bicycle. All the while we listen to his thoughts in a stream of consciousness voice-over that Scott has said was partly inspired by reading James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

An interesting footnote to the making of the film is how Ridley was able to use music composed by iconic film composer John Barry for his very first film. From the YouTube page for this clip:

He had shot the film silently on 16mm when still a student at the Royal College of Art, and three years later he managed to raise funds from the BFI to assemble a soundtrack. He approached Barry for permission to use a recording named ‘Onward Christian Spacemen’, which proved to be unaffordable – but Barry was so impressed by Scott’s work that he recorded a new version especially for the film.

Still taken from the film Boy and Bicycle

Boy and Bicycle is also included in the compilation Cinema16: British Short Films.

“Silver & Light” is a short documentary about photographer Ian Ruhter who uses an early photographic technique called collodion wet plate which requires a portable darkroom because images must be developed while the plate is wet. So the entire process takes less than fifteen minutes. Wikipedia calls it “a very inconvenient form” of photography.

Unsatisfied with digital cameras and the general homogeneity of photography in general, Ruhter dedicated himself to this historical method. He converted a delivery truck into a giant camera and has been driving around the U.S. photographing and interviewing a diverse range of people for what he calls the American Dream project.

PBS’s American Experience website has a detailed overview of wet plate photography. Lomography Magazine recently interviewed Ruhter about his work. Here’s a short video of Ruther shooting on the streets of Los Angeles.

Below are some examples of his work from his Tumblr blog:

photos by Ian Ruhter

Rosetta is a short film about the Long Now Foundation‘s Rosetta Project, a language archive inspired by the Rosetta Stone and Long Now’s mission to foster long-term thinking. Filmmaker Scott Oller made the documentary as his senior thesis; it was shot earlier this year and features interviews with staff members of Long Now and the Internet Archive.

The Rosetta Project has collected over 100,000 pages of information about more than 2,500 languages and intends to archive them for thousands of years. The documents are available online at the Internet Archive. A subset of the document collection has been micro-etched onto a three inch diameter nickel disk so that no technology more complex than magnification is needed to read it. A limited number of these disks have been manufactured.

The Rosetta Disk fits in the palm of your hand, yet it contains over 13,000 pages of information on over 1,500 human languages. The pages are microscopically etched and then electroformed in solid nickel, a process that raises the text very slightly – about 100 nanometers – off of the surface of the disk. Each page is only 400 microns across – about the width of 5 human hairs – and can be read through a microscope at 650X as clearly as you would from print in a book.

The original Rosetta Stone is actually a portion of an Egyptian stele created in the year 196 BC. A rather prosaic political document of its time, it was eventually unearthed in 1799 by Napoleon’s army and became the key to deciphering and translating Egyptian hieroglyphs for the first time. Its usefulness was accidental. The stone features the same text written in multiple languages, and that allowed researchers to deduce the language they didn’t know from those they did.

From that example and other historical precedents the Rosetta Disk has been purposefully designed as a resource for future generations to better understand their linguistic past. As half of the world’s languages are predicted to disappear within the next century, our current linguistic diversity may be hard for them to fathom. One side of the Rosetta Disk features parallel texts to facilitate translation across languages and to provide a clue to the intention of the object and the contents of the micro-etchings on the other side. There’s an interactive version on their site.

Photo by Rolfe Horn

The Rosetta Project’s other activities include building a database with PanLex to facilitate trillions of translations across thousands of languages and sponsoring “record-a-thons” for people to document their languages on phones and other personal devices and post them to the Internet Archive. They are participants in the Endangered Languages Project, along with Google and others, to help document the world’s most endangered languages.

Photo by The Long Now Foundation

In this PSA video, Zach Galifianakis humorously reports from the exotic future of the year 2015, with fellow time travellers Sarah Silverman, Chloë Moretz, Marisa Tomei, Tracy Morgan, and Old Spice ad man Isaiah Mustafa, to bring a serious message. This new Funny or Die video promotes the effort to end AIDS in the near future by ONE, an international anti-poverty nonprofit organization.

From ONE’s press release:

The video closes with a recommendation for viewers to visit ONE.org to sign a petition urging lawmakers to reverse proposed budget cuts to the life-saving AIDS program, PEPFAR, and fulfill America’s commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

image via ONE

Actor Andy Griffith died today at age 86. He is best known now for his eponymous TV show of the 1960s and for playing the lead in the legal drama Matlock when he was in his 60′s. But Griffith started out as a standup comedian and this monologue about a country fella watching a college football game was the routine that made him famous and led to everything else. This video combines a 1953 performance of the story with illustrations by George Woodbridge from a version for Mad Magazine in 1958. There’s also an original short film that recreates the routine.

In a very different turn from his television work, Griffith starred as the manipulative Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes in the film A Face in the Crowd, one of the great critiques of the power of mass media. Here’s a clip:

Terminally Illin’ is a graphic novel, co-created by cancer survivor Kaylin Andres and Jon Solo that tells the story of a young woman in her 20′s who is diagnosed with cancer. While in treatment she takes a journey inside her own body and learns more about the disease affecting her and how her body fights against it.

It’s inspiring to see the medium being used for something more noble: a story about an all too real enemy to humanity, authors who are passionately dedicated to their project, and a plan to directly share any benefits with the people who need it the most.

Last year Kaylin and Jon successfully raised money on Kickstarter for a 26-page black & white preview of this story. That book was published by legendary San Francisco independent publisher Last Gasp. The current Kickstarter project (which will end on May 21) will realize their complete vision of a full-color Terminally Illin’ book that is well over 100 pages.

We have 80 pages already drawn and colored, so we’re about half way finished with the book. It’s very time consuming and without funding, this project might take years to complete. We’d like to finish it this year.

The donation benefits not only reward those who give money, they also send cool anti-cancer stuff to patients in cancer centers around the country. The oncologically proactive schwag include a “Chemo Cocktails” screen print, immune system cell pillows, and a bandana based on the Egyptian papyrus that is the earliest description and treatment of cancer from 1600 BC. Yes, cancer education just got both geeky and cool.

Inspired by the support of Kaylin’s cat Iceman through her own ordeal, there’s also a spotlight on the pets of cancer patients in the story. They form their own superhero team “Pet Justice”:

You can tell from the video that Kaylin and Jon bring a great attitude and sense of humor to this project. And that they are dedicated to creating something helpful and inspiring for those who are fighting against this disease. As Kaylin said in their first Kickstarter video:

I want to create something that speaks to other young adults on their level, having been there myself. For support, useful information, a distraction, artistic expression, and most important of all laughter which is the best medicine.

Hopefully this comic can be some help especially to the 70,000+ young adults who are diagnosed with cancer in the US each year. The American Cancer Society’s Cancer.org is a great source for more information on the disease. The original Terminally Illin’ preview comic Kickstarter video is below.

Thanks to Colin from Last Gasp for letting us know about this project!