Here’s the full-length version of Needing/Getting, the new music video by OK Go that doubles as a Super Bowl ad for Chevy Sonic (we posted the teaser trailer last week). The ad is part of Chevy’s Let’s Do This challenge.

OK Go set up over 1000 instruments over two miles of desert outside Los Angeles. A Chevy Sonic was outfitted with retractable pneumatic arms designed to play the instruments, and the band recorded this version of Needing/Getting, singing as they played the instrument array with the car. The video took 4 months of preparation and 4 days of shooting and recording. There are no ringers or stand-ins; Damian took stunt driving lessons. Each piano had the lowest octaves tuned to the same note so that they’d play the right note no matter where they were struck.

You may remember the tiny Darth Vader using “The Force” last year in a Volkswagen Super Bowl commercial, and now its follow-up ad has been released. It’s called The Dog Strikes Back and features the dog from the 2011 commercial getting into shape to chase down a VW Beetle. Be sure to watch the whole thing for the Star Wars cantina scene. Volkswagen also combined dogs and Star Wars in the previously released Super Bowl ad called The Bark Side. In addition, they have created an Intergalatic Invite, which will create a custom “Big Game Party” Star Wars-themed title crawl.

Here’s the 2011 The Force spot:

via AdWeek

On top of working with Sesame Street on mixing primary colors, OK Go is starring in a Super Bowl ad (which doubles as the music video for song, Needing/Getting) for the 2012 Chevy Sonic. The teaser trailer has been released and so far we know that it involves one car (a Chevy Sonic, of course), 288 guitars stuck to a fence, 55 stranded pianos, 1157 homemade instruments and a singer that is a “professionally trained driver”. The full video will premiere on February 5, 2012 during the Super Bowl.

via Gizmodo

First it was Matthew Broderick reprising his role as Ferris Bueller for a 2012 Honda CR-V Super Bowl ad and now, just released, is Transactions, another Super Bowl ad but this time starring Jerry Seinfeld. In this one, real-life car enthusiast Seinfeld tries to bribe his way into the first 2012 Acura NSX delivery from the dealership. There’s a few fun cameos including The Soup Nazi and (fellow car enthusiast) Jay Leno.

High speed slot car racing is apparently a thing in Finland. Witness this unbelievably fast race at the Rail Car Enthusiasts Club (the race begins at the 0:55 mark). The custom slot cars have a top speed of 100 MPH.

via Jalopnik

Realtor and racing enthusiast Peter Tryce rolled his open-top Cobra race car at Willow Springs Raceway in California while traveling 130 MPH. The harrowing crash and subsequent cartwheels were captured by his GoPro camera. Amazingly, Tryce and his camera both came out intact.

via Jalopnik & One Hot Lap

via Allee Willis Museum of Kitsch

images via OOOK

This extraordinary video of an August land speed record attempt by George Poteet and Ron Main’s Speed Demon race car shows the vehicle reaching 462 MPH on the Bonneville Salt Flats. The video includes onboard camera footage shot using Replay XD1080 cameras.

The speed exceeds the current record for piston engined, wheel driven racers, but the team was unable to replicate the feat on the return run, a requirement for land speed records.

via Jalopnik & Hemmings Blog

photo via Speed Demon

The 5:04 PM mutant art car, a back-end crushed 1978 Olds Cutlass Supreme, was created by Michael Michael (aka Danger Ranger) and its fun history begins with the San Francisco Bay Area Loma Prieta earthquake.

On October 17, 1989 at 5:04 PM, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area and a brick wall collapsed on the rear half of an Olds Cutlass parked by Clayton and Page streets. Michael Michael saw it there and the creative wheels began to turn. “I bet that will still run”, he mused, and he placed a note on the car offering to buy it.

Within a few days, the car had changed hands, and with the addition of a new paint job and a license plate bearing the exact time of the earthquake, it became a conceptional art piece and a testament to the powerful forces of nature…

In 1991, 5:04 was the first “art car” to make an appearance at Burning Man, beginning a trend that has grown to epic proportions.

The 5:04 PM (aka the Earthquake Car) is now sporting a shiny new paint job and, as it was Burning Man’s first art car at the desert’s festival, is on display at Mutant Rides: Origin of a Species Burning Man art car and costumes exhibit at the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada. The exhibit opened October 7, 2011 and runs through July 25, 2012. Artist Kevin Evans took a photograph of The 5:04 PM at the 1991 Burning Man which shows its original color and condition after the earthquake.

photos by Eric Baron and Michael Michael

The Crashed Ferrari Table by French designer Charly Molinelli is a coffee table containing a wrecked Ferrari. To make the table, Molinelli found a totaled Ferrari and had it crushed to fit the dimensions of the table. The table now resides in a private home.

via Recyclart

photos by Chris Murphy

“The Nautilus” by Five Ton Crane, a San Francisco Bay Area art collective, is a 25 foot long art car inspired by the submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. It has a water cannon and a night vision periscope, but its most awesome detail is a 4 foot diameter door with a motorized brass aperture window shade and a squid-themed keyless entry system (video). The door was designed and built by artist Dr. Alan Rorie.

via Make

photos and video via Dr. Alan Rorie

The “Mother of All Hot Wheels Tracks” is a 2000 foot long Hot Wheels track which winds throughout a suburban home, down a sidewalk, and around a pool. A model car completed the course in three minutes. The track was built and filmed by YouTube user therealtexasaggie98. The video is raising awareness for Hope For Gabe, a charity fighting to end Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a terminal childhood illness.

via Deadspin

The resurrected DeLorean Motor Company is producing an electric version of the iconic 1980s DMC-12 sports car for release in 2013. The car is expected to have about 260 HP and a 70 to 100 mile range. Jalopnik recently test drove a running prototype of the car.

Founded by John DeLorean, the original DeLorean Motor Company collapsed in 1982. The company’s sole production model, the DMC-12, was made famous in 1985′s Back to the Future. Texas businessman Stephen Wynne bought the remnants of the company, including enough spare parts to make new cars, in 1995.

photo 1 by Kevin McCauley, photos 2 and 3 via DeLorean Motor Company

Eric Staller, the enigmatic art car maker and recent San Francisco transplant, is the subject of “We Come in Peace,” a wonderful article in The Bold Italic. Staller discusses his art and the joys of driving around town in a Beetle with 1,659 lights. The article is written by Anisse Gross and beautifully photographed by Gene X Hwang.

I ask Eric what keeps him making art. “I’m really out to blow my own mind. If I can blow my own mind, I can blow anyone’s mind.” And it’s working – everywhere we go we’re blowing minds. People are so distracted by the UFO that bikes swerve and pedestrians stop mid-crosswalk. I can picture the headlines now: Mission Hipster Riding Fixie with No Helmet Killed by Urban UFO.

We’ve previously written about Staller a few times. See our coverage his seven person conference bike, goldfish bowl helmet, and most recently our post on his bowling pin-enhanced Fiat.

The Revenge of the Electric Car, directed by Chris Paine, is a documentary about the resurgence of the electric car (trailer). The documentary chronicles simultaneous efforts by Nissan, GM, Tesla, and the DIY movement to create a viable electric car for series production. The Revenge of the Electric Car opens October 21 in select cities.

In Revenge of the Electric Car, director Chris Paine takes his film crew behind the closed doors of Nissan, GM, and the Silicon Valley start-up Tesla Motors to chronicle the story of the global resurgence of electric cars. Without using a single drop of foreign oil, this new generation of car is America’s future: fast, furious, and cleaner than ever.

photo by Opacity

photo via Power Racing Series

The Power Racing Series is an auto racing series for hacked Power Wheels toy cars. The event is aimed at hackerspaces and races take place at midwestern Maker Faires. Founder Jim Burke is raising funds for the 2012 season on Kickstarter.

The last race included over 22 cars, and got us noticed nationwide. Wired Magazine just ran a short piece on Power Racing Series in their October issue, and we will also be getting a blurb in the November issue of Make Magazine. We’re expecting even more cars and more races for the 2012 season. Unfortunately, our pocketbooks are saying otherwise.

“The DJ Mobile” by Olaf Mooij is an art car that doubles as a DJ setup and 14 speaker sound system. We previously wrote about Mooij’s wonderful “Braincar.”

With 14 woofers, tweeters, and other loudspeakers boldly splaying in various directions out the back of a dark blue 1983 Ford Sierra, the DJ Mobile has a surreal, cartoonish look.

Not only does the car have a professional-quality Beyma sound system, but it’s also got a DJ setup, with a place to set up turntables and a mixer on the roof of the car. There’s a hole in the roof as well, where the DJ can stand and mix.

via Make

photos by Olaf Mooij

“Drive Recklessly” by The Midnight Show is a hilariously twisted driver safety PSA spoof that offers a scenario in which striking a pedestrian with a car may be the best policy. The Midnight Show is a recurring sketch comedy show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles.

via Cameron Tangey & Matt Cutts

Architecture and art collective Ant Farm were no ordinary group of building designers. Formed in 1968 by Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier and Doug Michels, Ant Farm’s name was a metaphor for “underground architecture”. Ironically their most famous work Cadillac Ranch (1974) protrudes noticeably from the ground (see our previous post).

photo by Scott Beale

The new film “Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm” by Elizabeth Federici and Laura Harrison directs long overdue attention to the group’s work and legacy. The trailer for the film gives a taste of Ant Farm’s energy and attitude which set the tone for so much culture jamming that followed.

Here’s co-director Elizabeth Federici at the Sonoma International Film Festival where the film screened earlier this year. Michels, who died in 2003, was involved in the project early on–the film has been more than a decade in the making.

Ant Farm’s work anticipates all kinds of conceptual art and pranks, including The Yes Men, Improv Everywhere, Burning Man, and The Cacophony Society. In fact Gary Warne who founded The Suicide Club, the progenitor of The Cacophony Society, was a participant in Ant Farm’s Media Burn event in which a modified Cadillac crashed through a pyramid of television sets. Twenty years later, The San Francisco Cacophony Society would have it’s own “Kill Your TV” event.

photo by Chip Lord

On July 4, Independence Day, 1975, what a TV newscaster described as a “media circus” assembles at San Francisco’s Cow Palace Stadium. A pyramid of television sets are stacked, doused with kerosene, and set ablaze. Then a modified 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz, piloted by two drivers who are guided only by a video monitor between their bucket seats, smashes through the pyramid destroying the TV sets.

The Media Burn event was held at San Francisco’s Cow Palace and also featured a revitalized John F. Kennedy (who had been killed 12 years earlier) making a speech to the crowd, and a prominent souvenir stand. Here’s video of Media Burn:

The original 30-minute Media Burn video produced by Ant Farm has more footage of the event, car design details, the full Kennedy speech, and more TV coverage. It is hosted at MediaBurn.org an online video archive run by Ant Farm co-conspirator Tom Weinberg. He and the Ant Farm guys were also part of a San Francisco video collective called Top Value Television (or TVTV) whose members included Harold Ramis and Bill Murray (prior to his debut on SNL).

photo by Chip Lord

Cadillac Ranch was created in 1974 in Amarillo, Texas. It features ten Cadillacs, ordered by model year from 1949 to 1963, set in the ground at an angle corresponding to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The cars have been in place for nearly 4 decades, and Cadillac Ranch, which is visible from Highway 40, has become an iconic piece of America’s roadside mythos.

The original look of Cadillac Ranch is long gone, due to decades of exposure to the elements and even more so to the thousands of roadside travelers who have removed pieces and added graffiti over the years.

photo by palmea

But the fact that Ant Farm didn’t encase their work in a sterile environment, and instead left it open to the public at large reflects their architectural foundations. After all: space, land and time are all factors of how Cadillac Ranch has evolved. And people.

photo by Tony

And all forms of use (including ab-use) are to be expected when Time and people are variables. And the 15,000+ photos on Flickr are a testament to how visitors to the Cadillac Ranch cherish the venerable roadside attraction. Our own Scott Beale took a set of photos of Cadillac Ranch while driving cross country last year. The ranch has also spawned a string of copycats from VW Slug Bug Ranch to “Airstream Ranch” to Australia’s Utes in the Paddock.

photo by jbeniflah

Below Ant Farm members Hudson Marquez, Chip Lord and Doug Michels with top-hatted Stanley Marsh 3, who commissioned Cadillac Ranch, at the 20th anniversary party for Cadillac Ranch on June 21, 1994.

photo by Rik Gruwez

The group has re-emerged somewhat in recent years. The book Ant Farm: Living Archive 7 came out in 2008, and Ant Farm itself (now composed of Lord, Schreier, and Bruce Tomb) has participated in exhibitions in San Francisco at SFMOMA in 2008 (part of the Art of Participation exhibition) and Southern Exposure Gallery in 2009. Both exhibits related to their earlier Media Van project which began in the past (1970), then in the “present” of 2008-2009 they collected media files at random from museum visitor cameras & phones for a time capsule to be opened in the future (2030) for another exhibit at SFMOMA. In 1975 they also created a Citizens Time Capsule which was due to be unearthed in 2000.

Ant Farm’s work was sometimes specifically and radically predictive. We don’t yet know if Doug Michels’ prognostication of an outer space “think tank” featuring a giant sphere of water and a super computer programmed by dolphins will come to pass. But he called it BlueStar and had thought it out extensively. Here’s Tom Weinberg presenting a compilation of videos featuring Doug Michels, including extensive details about Bluestar:

Here are a few more links on Ant Farm:

• More videos by Ant Farm member Chip Lord.
• Ant Farm 1968-1978 on Facebook
• Chip Lord’s Ant Farm homepage

Thanks to Ken Duffy for the tip!

The next Rental Car Rally, a chaotic costumed road race, will run from Austin to New Orleans, September 30 through October 2, 2011.

Rental Car Rally’s first-ever South-centric, gumbo-fueled piece of four-wheeled madcappery, Austin to New Orleans will take you and your jean-short’d brethren on a 12-hour overnight journey through swamps haunted by ghost crocs, past farmsteads run by necromancers, and into a well-tippled and besotted infamy.

ArtCar artist Emily Duffy has started a small fundraising campaign to help cover basic expenses for artcar artists to travel from the San Francisco Bay Area to Southern California as part of ArtCar Fest 2011. There are two free public mobile exhibition events they have been invited to participate in, one at the Santa Ana Art Walk on October 1, 2011 from 6 to 10 PM and the other in Joshua Tree at the Art Queen Gallery on October 6, 2011 from 5 to 9 PM.

Ken Duffy’s PriusTorik at Cabazon Dinosaurs

There are plenty of opportunities to see the artcars as they travel from San Francisco down south, as they will be hitting roadside attractions and unique stops like the Madonna Inn, Bubblegum Alley in San Luis Obispo, the giant rodeo hats in Salinas, the Cabazon Dinosaurs and many more.

photos by Ken Duffy

In “Gymkhana 4,” action sportsmaster Ken Block displays his astonishing precision driving skills while racing around the backlots of Universal Studios in a 600 hp Ford Fiesta race car (the fun begins at the 1:30 mark). Highlights include Block smashing through a wall, performing car ballet with a quintet of forklifts, and doing 360s around a gorilla on a Segway. The video is the fourth and most absurd to date of Block’s Gymkhana videos. They take their name from Gymkhana, a motorsport that challenges drivers to perform feats of precision driving.

In 2010 we wrote about Gymkhana 3, in which Block raced around a Paris racetrack.

via Jalopnik

Senna is a new documentary by Asif Kapadia about Brazilian race car driver Ayrton Senna, an extraordinarily gifted Formula One driver and three time world champion, who died in a tragic racing accident in 1994 at age 34 (see the trailer). Senna has the distinction of being the last driver to die in a Formula One racing accident.

Senna’s remarkable story, charting his physical and spiritual achievements on the track and off, his quest for perfection, and the mythical status he has since attained, is the subject of SENNA, a documentary feature that spans the racing legend’s years as an F1 driver, from his opening season in 1984 to his untimely death a decade later.

The film opens in limited US theaters this month.

via DJ Spooky

“Braincar” by Dutch artist Olaf Mooij is an art car with a giant brain atop the back half of the vehicle. Cameras on the car capture photos and video of its daytime travels. At night, the car “dreams” a video remix of the day’s footage, projecting the imagery on to the giant brain. Built in 2005, “Braincar” is now on display in Karlsruhe, Germany at the Center for Art and Media through January 2012.

via Designboom

photos by Olaf Mooij

“Metropolis II” by artist Chris Burden is a monumental kinetic sculpture of a miniature city with 1,100 model cars traveling along 18 roadways that snake throughout the structure. Recently completed after four years of construction, the work will be installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this Fall. Supermarché has posted a wonderful short documentary about “Metropolis II,” and Co.design recently interviewed Burden about the process of building the sculpture.

We posted about “Metropolis II” last Fall, when the work was still under construction.

via Neatorama

photo by E. Koyama