this is the funniest thing i've seen today

Great Editing in new Nike Soccer Ad

Yet another one of Nike's genus ad campaigns. It's got great camera work and features an Eagles of Death Metal Song. Priceless.

The Youtube Addict Music Video

This is beautiful!

the poem pavillion

This is amazing to me. Via the Web site:

The results of an extensive exploration with shadows, the One Day Poem Pavilion demonstrates the poetic, transitory, site-sensitive and time-based nature of light and shadow.
Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilion’s surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which–during specific times of the year–transform into the legible text of a poem. The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar: a theme of new-life during the summer solstice, a reflection on the passing of time at the period of the winter solstice.

I'd love to see this.

galaxies gone wild

I'm kind of under the impression that the Universe, mess that it is, is the most controversial art exhibit of all. To celebrate the Hubble's 18th anniversary, NASA has put up a beautiful photo gallery of merging galleries. Please enjoy.

Smart Grey Squirrel Completes a Tough Obstacle Course

This squirrel is amazing!

Hilarious

http://office-humour.co.uk/content/images/2006/10/4980.jpg
YOU MUST READ IT OUT LOUD! (or else you wont even understand the joke)

This is VERY entertaining.

Gotta Love This Imaginative Brand Distribution

Zoo York, a newish hip skate shoe company, is inviting people to participate in a really cool "get the word out" contest. You should come up with ideas and submit. Check their video. It's pretty brilliant.

Remember the crickets in Olin?!?!?!?

Human snake

This is a cool stop time animation.

Amazing Bass Guitar

If you haven't yet heard Victor Wooten from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones listen to him. I think he is the best bassist of our time and this video sums up his funky jazzy style and his signature bass techniques. Ive been looking for rivals let me know.

Plane Gets Struck By Lightning yesterday

This is dramatic.


yesterday

49 Jewish Noses

A man stands in front of the art work "49 Jewish Noses" during a preview of the exhibition "Typical! Cliches of Jews and Others" on March 18, 2008 at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. From March 20 to August 3, 2008, the museum presents an exhibition about the stereotyped seeing, perceiving, and compartmentalizing of images and objects. (Sebastian Willnow/AFP - Getty Images)

Trapped

Another Perez Hilton link. This video shows the security tape footage of a man who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours.

spend some time...

(winner for best digital photography)

ADOBE DESIGN ACHIEVEMENT AWARD WINNERS.

I can't think of anything more technically relevant to our class than this site of winners in categories from "Best Animation" (the winner made this visually stunning piece using Illustrator, AfterEffects and Maya) to "Best Live Action" to "Best Packaging." Take time. Enjoy.

Nova mini-series collection

Nova is a part of PBS that is dedicated to making cool documentaries that explore the history and development of many different theories, practices, ideas, and subjects. Most of the series they make are about science, but not all. Here are a few of that I have watched and enjoyed:

The Elegant Universe
Eleven dimensions, parallel universes, and a world made out of strings. It's not science fiction, it's string theory.

Absolute Zero
The story of the harnessing of cold and the race to reach the lowest temperature possible

Secrets of the Parthenon
How did the ancient Athenians build this near-flawless icon of Greece's golden age?

Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
Science is 'Exhibit A' in a landmark trial on the teaching of evolution.

Buddha With Thousand Hands 2008

This video is part of the inspiration for my current project.

fun with fonts

Bloggers -- myself included -- seriously love typeface and fonts. It's a weird phenomenon, but it becomes an obsession. There have been some great posts recently about font that I thought might interest other huge fucking nerds font scholars out there.


1. the font game. Andrew Witherspoon and I netted a score of 22 on our first try.

2. top fonts of 2007. I like BistroScript.

3. adobe's SERIOUSLY FASCINATING post on the ampersand. You think I'm kidding. I'm not. It's really interesting:

When creating a new typeface, a designer can inject the most artistic flair into the ampersand character. The term ampersand, as Geoffrey Glaister writes in his "Glossary of the Book," is a corruption of and (&) per se and, which literally means "(the character) & by itself (is the word) and." The symbol & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin word for "and."

4. type city. This reminds me SO MUCH of Katie's (sp?) text project in class.

5. This documentary on the printing press has FINALLY been posted on YouTube and it's INCREDIBLE.
The Machine that Made Us: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

(here's part one):

tire-d?

This is a nice little site of aerial photography that's been showing up on tumblogs lately. Click along the menu of "recent posts" on the right to see different shots. It's really cool to see how different -- and sometimes how much more beautiful -- things can appear from different angles.

Guitar hero controller band

This is hilarious.There are obvious huge limitations like sound quality and number of notes & techniques possible with just a guitar hero controller setup. Its pretty much just a cool concept but damn it sounds like shit.The singer is ridiculous! Haha

Instructions on how to make a Guitar Hero controller into Real instrument

I suck at guitar hero but for people that can play expert mode this feature would be amazing and make them look really cool.
Imagine if somebody practiced this instrument. This is another way to stay away from actually playing the guitar.

artist raped on a walk of world peace

The article on the rape and murder of a female italian performance artist, on a trek for world peace can be found at this URL: http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=139514&bolum=133
I think it is another striking performance but in the way that it was changed, and in a sad, very twisted way, it helped move her message further around the world, touched more people, and started a huge discussion about her work and ideas.

The K Foundation

As long as were on a roll with controversial artworks, here is a particularly fascinating event that took place in the 1990's, when the K foundation (also known as the band KLF) burned one million quid (the entirety of their record sales profits) on the beach on Britain. The ramifications of this are obviously huge, and the work continues to be discussed for its audacity and impact, by- of course- the lovers and the haters. Here is their wikipedia page (which describes their oeuvre of works - and there are many.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation

Here is the first segment of a documentary made about the project. You can find and watch all 5 parts of this (each 10 minutes) on youtube. It tracks them across several years subsequent to burning all that cash.

Designing the news

Reformatting the way information is typically displayed is cool. The news is cool. Typography is cool. New approaches to infographics and other typical news design staples are really cool. The site Designing The News tackles these issues in a beautiful way. More from its about page:

News in general is primarily a text based format. When accompanied by an image, the image serves to reinforce the story, but what if the news was the image? DTN is about bridging the gap between traditional cartoonists and modern day generative news visualisations.

Anyway. Browse around, most of the recent experiments involve The Guardian, its pretty cool stuff.

muxtape

muxtape

i don't know if you've played with this yet, but it's essentially just a tumblr interface someone built that allows you to build your own "muxtapes" -- or playlists you can share with whoever the hell you want. i think this is an interesting natural next step for the ever-growing music culture. it used to be you had to listen to an album all the way through, and because of that, an album was a more conceptual work of art. since the eighties people have been making their OWN mixes -- mix tapes, of course -- and now mix cds are the preferred gift for anyone you might have a crush on. this is the same thing, but all online.

and i think the coolest part of this site -- besides the start, hearkening-to-the-eighties interface -- is that you can listen to other people's muxtapes, too. there's a ton of them on the opening page, and you can reload to see new ones.

now you can facebook post your mix on your crush's wall and save yourself the trip to his or her dorm room!

YOU MUST READ THIS

I'm stealing from Perez Hilton here, but you must read about this artwork done by an undergraduate at Yale.


http://perezhilton.com/2008-04-18-she-attempts-to-explain-herself

Santiago Sierra - 2006 installation in German synagogue

Santiago Sierra is known for his provocative performances, which have included paying refugees from Chechenia to remain inside cardboardboxes, giving money to young Cubans for the priviledge of tattooing their backs, dying the hair of Africans blonde to make them look European, and spraying 10 Iraqis immigrant workers with insulating foam. But the Spanish artist provoked outrage among Jewish groups in Germany yesterday with his latest installation - a homemade gas chamber set up in a former synagogue.

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2006/03/holocaust-insta.php

recreating the past

Color Wars has launched a pretty cool project: They asked their readers to recreate old childhood pictures of themselves. I definitely want to try to do this -- I mean, you'd have to try to remember EXACTLY what you were feeling at a completely different part of your life. The best recreations are from people who chose to pay special, close attention to facial expression and body language. It's hard for the recreations to not look awkward. It's definitely an interesting idea, in my opinion, to try to recreate a candid moment verbatim. It shows us how REAL life truly is.

Time-based prints

Oscar Diaz bridges the gap between time-based media and print in his calendar and plant projects. I'm not quite sure how this works (some kind of hydraulic system to get the ink moving, but how does he control where it goes? I see an embossed path, but how does that keep the ink in line?) but as a lover of print who is getting into time-based works, this is pretty sweet.

Chris Crocker's Catch 22

I think Chris Crocker is pretty amazing. Yes, he's egotistical and flamboyant, but he's also talented and creative and expressive as can be. The public - his lovers and the haters - have definitely responded to him. That fact makes this video particularly interesting. Listen to the story he tells about the deal he says he's gonna turn down. He raises a relevant point - a true catch 22 - about style, personality, expression, and cursing. He also stands behind it. It will be fascinating to see where Chris Crocker ends up in the future, whether he just disappears or hits it big. Check it out.

Ugo Rondinone

Fabricated in aluminum and coated in white enamel, the sculptures are cast from trees found in the countryside outside Naples, the hometown of the artist’s parents. In accordance with Italian law, the trees, which still bear olives, were cast on site in rubber; in the foundry, wax gave way to a final aluminum cast. Introducing metallic casts of this ancient tree to Lower Manhattan’s modern metropolis, typically defined by manmade structures of glass and concrete, the artist furthers his investigation of themes of time and displacement, and the relationship between natural and artificial environments. The white trees, weighing a ton each, will complement New York City’s winter landscape, establishing a discourse between the history-laden olive trees and their unusual urban context.

People or animals?

When I see things like this, I feel a certain hopelessness. It makes me feel that at bottom we really are just brutal animals, ready to claw at each other and tear each other apart. This group of teenage girls kidnapped and then viciously attacked a 16 year old peer because she wrote something they didn't like on myspace. As payback they videotaped themselves beating her in the hopes of making a popular internet video. The irony is they succeeded. But now they are all facing punishment, as they should. Very sad.

Canine Freestyle

If you are a dog lover, or just a life-lover, you will LOVE this clip.

Anouk - Modern World

This is an interesting new video from the Dutch singer Anouk. I like the amish style art direction with this song.

Clever Collage

Musical with Enormous Newspaper Puppets and Gandhi

The video at the bottom of this link is cool. Finally a musical about Gandhi with performance newspaper art and opera combined. Very Cool

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/arts/music/14saty.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

SUPERHUMAN MIND-BLOWING SOCCER TRICKS

These soccer tricks are some of the most incredible human body movements, timing , and force that I have ever seen. This seems like a combination of Parkour (free-running), martial arts, and good old fashioned futbol. Enjoy.

Cooking With Coolio - Watch a Kitchen Pimp

This is hilarious.

Young @ Heart

This is an amazing video of an elderly rock group called young @ heart doing a cover of a Coldplay song. You can hear the singer's oxygen machine going in the background. But his voice is still deep and rich, reminds of a little of Nick Cave. Very poetic.

Bo Fo' Sho'

My older brother showed me this a while ago, and a friend recently sent this to me again. After I saw it for the second time, it made me wonder, is this an example like chris crocker or the guy singing usher, where a person's personality makes the video? or is it merely the lines that bo comes up with?

Funkphonic

This is a cool short animation I found.

..Haha.. Hahahaha!

This is Ninja part 2. Check out Afro Ninja if you havent it is a pretty short but effective viral video.

This site has a lot of awesome contemporary art

http://www.erratica.us/tag/art/

satire

Hi everyone. As you may or may not know, the Pioneer has come under fire recently because of a satire piece printed in the April Fools' issue. I have TENTATIVELY published it, unsigned and unedited, on my Web site, so you can read it by clicking here.

Some students feel that this article is blatantly racist, and worse than the blackface incident last semester. The authors of this article, of which I am one, intended the piece to COMBAT racist ideas about Native Americans, by satirizing the political correctness and inherent racism within the way in which Whitman deals with diversity issues. As a friend wrote to me in a yet-unpublished letter,

"The article meant devalue and satire the prejudices it appears to espouse. What’s funny about the column is the fact that its imaginary writer sees no contradiction between his/her apparent love of “diversity” and the racist views he/she espouses. [The] idiot-writer-persona is essentially saying ‘Yay on-campus diversity!’ and ‘I’m scared of people who are different!’ at the same time. If this sounds uncomfortably familiar on a campus all to willing to shout from the mountaintops of its efforts to raise diversity and comfortably navigate racial identity, then I’m with you."

Regardless, my job as editor-in-chief is being threatened, and many people are very, very upset about the article. Is the art of satire dying? While my co-editor were looking up YouTube covers of "Hey There Delilah" (don't ask), we found this:



Is this funny or offensive? I think it's funny because it makes me uncomfortable about my own stereotypes. I'm curious to know what others think.

Manga made real by Murakami

Someone finally got around to fulfilling my life dream of making lifesize manga semen sculptures.

Rethinking the music video