Nice view, nice people, nice weather. Nice.
Music: The Homeless Wanderer by Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou (available on Ethiopiques, Vol. 21).
).High-res H.264 Quicktime version here.
All posts by Cassidy Curtis
In Brainbows
Somebody had to do this, and it might as well be me:
Radiohead album + mouse neurons = mashup goodness!
I’ve been digging this album for a couple of weeks now, and it has left its share of fluorescent traces in my little brain. But the download came without any official cover art, so all the fans were left to make up their own. (There are some really nice ones if you follow that link, although this one‘s my personal fave.) When some Harvard and MIT neuroscientists released a paper about color-coding neurons in transgenic mice, this seemed like the obvious and perfect use of their pictures. Enjoy! (Back cover art after the jump).
High scoring Scrabble letters are darker!
Common Letters And Numbers Are Brighter, Study Suggests. Makes perfect sense to me!
I’ve always found it curious that the five highest-scoring Scrabble letters (K, J, Q, X and Z) all happen to be different shades of brown in my synesthetic map of the alphabet. Now there’s a new study by Daniel Smilek et al that suggests that this may be a pretty common phenomenon: “The More Common the Digit, the More Radiant the Color in Grapheme Color Synaesthesia”. How cool! This is the same Smilek who distinguished “projector” from “associator” synaesthetes in 2004.
(thanks to James for the link!)
Burning Man Timelapse
Bay Area artist Peef did this terrific timelapse video of the entire week of Burning Man 2007 (including Paul Addis’ premature burnination on Monday night!) It almost makes me not feel bad about missing it this year. Almost.
(via the dorkbot-sf mailing list.)
Help! A Bear is Eating Me!
Imagine a novel called “Help! A bear is eating me!”
Are you imagining it?
No, seriously, try it now. How would it start? Main character. Being eaten. By a bear. For real. For a whole novel.
Are you getting anything yet? No? Not even a first line?
Well, if you’re having trouble imagining this novel, fear not, because my dear and astonishing friend Mykle Hansen has imagined it for you! Not just imagined it, but written it down in so many words! In chronological order! And as if that weren’t enough, he’s actually started to read them out loud and record them digitally for your digital word-listening enjoyment! I assure you, this is no bait-and-switch. No false bears here. No men in bear suits. No bears-as-metaphors-for-falling-stock-markets. The main character really* is being eaten, by a real* bear. I kid you not.
Anyway, you gotta hear this stuff. It’s really good. Pick your favorite flavor:
feedburner RSS feed
subscribe via iTunes
just download the mp3s
The book itself is due out in print this fall, via Afterbirth Books. And if you like what you’re hearing, may I also recommend Mykle’s first book of short stories (self-published, in the literal sense of xeroxing and cutting and gluing and binding), Eyeheart Everything
Update: How do I know about this book, you may wonder? Well, Mykle sends out these incredibly entertaining emails every time he publishes another chapter. These used to be only for a select elite (“people whose email address Mykle happens to have”) but now they’re available to the world on his blog! Check the conveniently named helpabeariseatingme.com!
*Disclaimer: by “real”, I mean “fictional”. But you get the point.
Hearts Revolution video
Well, how about that. Looks like someone has used one of my CC-licensed photos as part of a music video for electropunk band Hearts Revolution (warning, link leads to eye-hurting MySpace page.) The photo they used is a detail of a piece by Apex. I guess the filmmakers couldn’t find any decent graffiti-covered garage doors in their neighborhood, so they had to roll their own.
Newlyweds Ascending a Forklift
(with apologies to M. Duchamp)
Farm Fight!
Click here to download full-res Quicktime (720×480, 20MB)
A rousing game of Carcassonne played at lightning speed, while the boys play Rescue Rangers in the background. Starring Andy James, Elliott, Finn, and myself. Location: Vashon Island, Washington. Shot, as usual, on a Canon DSLR, at a rate of 10 seconds per frame. Video edited using Quicktime Pro and iMovie. (This is my first time using iMovie, and I now understand what Lorelei meant when she said it was “like editing with a big crayon.”)
Toypography
Here’s a fun idea: a set of colorful wooden blocks that can be rearranged into English words and their equivalent characters in Japanese/Chinese Kanji: Toypography. I especially like the above example because three of the four letters are exactly the right color!
(via Everyone Forever, via Boing Boing.)
Lichtfaktor
Lichtfaktor brings us another iteration on the lightpainting animation meme. I like how he uses street furniture like mailboxes and trashcans as parts of the animated characters. It’s like the most non-destructive kind of graffiti imaginable… talk about leaving no trace! It’s also got a sweet IDM soundtrack.
(via Wooster Collective)
Previously:
Lightpainting animation brings everyone happiness!
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