something in the way

Out of an explosion of terrifying industrial noise, through a murky haze of retro-tinged monochromatic texture, Sigur Rós emerge in an enigmatic teaser for a new project dubbed INNI.

In case that arresting grind of gears and aggressive cacophony don’t square you away, you’re treated to film of the band playing and more-characteristic, lullaby-like tunes.

It remains extraordinary to me what a phenomenon Sigur Rós and, via bandmates, Jónsi have become. These Icelandic maestros have made all manner of sonic experimentation wildly popular, bringing their moody, sometimes-cinematic, meandering compositional genius around the planet.

Some music I like, personally, is very unpopular. Some makes Stereogum – like Sigur Rós. And in this case, I’m excited for a new release. (Most readers are betting, and I agree, on a live concert video release. If it all looks like this, that’ll be just fine.) Strip away the visibility, the artiness of a particular band, and to me Sigur Rós’ members have represented some vitally important musical imagination in recent years. You?

Side note – thanks for using Topspin, and making things embeddable and not exclusive. Embed on.

Photography can transform scale, whether in time, space, or a combination of the two. scntfc, the hyper-talented audiovisual artist, sends some eye-explodingly good work our way, prompted by yesterday’s coverage of a two-minute condensation of a trip from San Francisco to Paris.

Before returning to the theme of timelapse time travel and aerospace, let’s look first at what happens when you collapse scale in the spatial dimension via macro photography. Undone is a series of close-up shots, a balletic glimpse of the world viewed closer through a lens. Artist Andy Rohrmann aka scntfc shares it with us.

At top:

An excerpt from the forthcoming film series “Undone”.
Video: scntfc
Music: Burn A Pale Fire (scntfc + Morgan Kuhli) – Pale Fire 5
Canon 5d mkii, 100mm macro, 65mm macro

On the theme of airplane-window timelapse, “Minneapolis to Seattle” from three years ago pieces the airborne-viewed landscape into a patchwork collage. As the creator describes it:

a different take on time lapse photography and photo collage. all photos are taken on a flight from minneapolis to sea-tac, i had completed the basic layout and timelapse a few years ago, and finally polished it up with music, time shifting, and misc effects to give it more character. time shifting is still pretty rough and will be revised, time permitting…maybe in another four years. i have several more in this style, just have to find the time to update those as well.

Here’s another macro video for good measure:

First trailer for the upcoming film series “Undone”.
Music: Burn A Pale Fire (scntfc + Morgan Kuhli)

Canon 5d Mk2, 100mm f/2.8 Macro

Check out more of scntfc’s work – musical and visual – at:
http://strongforthefuture.com/

If you’re curious what conference I’m talking about, start by visiting http://www.switchconf.com/ . Too busy? Well, in a nutshell, it’s a 2 day event bringing together passionate people with different backgrounds to discuss and share ideas about innovation, entrepreneurship, science and technology.

Ricardo Sousa and his talented young team rolls out the 2011 edition in Oporto (Portugal), the next 16th and 17th of April, and yours truly was kindly invited to speak a few minutes on the subject of advertising, fire and jogging. Now that you’re curious, are you attending SWITCH Conference? If yes, give me a nudge as i’d really love to chat with you. Not networking. Hate that word. See ya in a few days then. Go buy your ticket, now.

Already making the rounds on the Web (as well it must, if it is to accomplish its author’s aims), a YouTube video immortalizes roll of film found against all odds in a snow bank. Upright Citizens Brigade video producer Todd Bieber, who found the roll, has turned them into a charming narrative as he looks for the film’s owner.

It’s a reminder of the importance of physical artifact in a digital age. Film by necessity has clear physical form in a single object; digital media has to exist physically somewhere, encoded in storage media, but it hardly has the same sense of definition.

I wish I had something intelligent to say, but I can only smile, especially as lately I’ve been rediscovering film myself. (If only motion/movie film were as easy to work with as still.)

But the question remains compelling: how do you bring physical objects into digital work? Should you? Do you turn to media like film, or do you find a way to make your digital work physical? (Prints, handmade wooden flash drives… even the beam of light that projects your work onto a wall, all can take on new meaning.)

Via NPR: Lost Photos Of NYC Blizzard: Found! [the picture show]

These photos from the backstage of Star Wars absolutely blow my mind. Thanks for the tip Mr Hicks.

This post, by definition, overlaps with the worlds of Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion, so I’m cross-posting — absolutely not one you want to miss, both because of the event in New York, and because the landscape of works here engages issues about which readers here I know are passionate.

Music and visuals are each themselves endless wells of potential; put them together, and “infinite possibility” probably isn’t an overstatement. This July, label Ghostly International is working with researchers at New York’s Eyebeam research center to do a free, one-week intensive on dynamically-generated visuals for sound. Before you read on, that deadline is the end of today NYC time, via a fairly simple online application form. Check out the full details and application form.

The event is led by artists Aaron Meyers (Flying Lotus’ Fieldlines) and Aaron Koblin (Daisy Bell). I asked Mr. Meyers for a round-up of the kind of work that he’s done…

Read the full story on Create Digital Motion

You’ll hear odd cynicism about people working on free software / open source projects. Something like, “well, harumph, it’s not as though a bunch of people will make this stuff in their free time.”

Not only are these folks wrong, but you can actually visualize the contributions to source trees – and the results look spectacularly hypnotic. It’s free software – the music video.

Okay, now, granted, I may get so mesmerized by the results that I’ll just spend time staring at that instead of getting actual work done, but – working too hard isn’t good for you, anyway. It’s an organic high, audiovisuals.

At top, Ryadh Amar sends in a visualization of the excellent, lightweight LXDE windowing environment for Linux. (Actually, I’m inspired to give LXDE a fresh install.) At bottom, a collage of various projects showing that these data visualizations can take on various identities. Gource can support just about any project repository, too: Git, Bazaar (popular on Ubuntu), and Mercurial (recently added to Google Code, incidentally) are available native, and CVS and SVN are available as third-party extensions for those of you kickin’ it oldskool and non-distributed. (Though, really, come join the 21st Century – it’s awesome.)

And Gource can visualize itself. Freaky. It’s all thanks to the ongoing awesomeness of OpenGL.

http://code.google.com/p/gource/

I’d love to see this added to project management so you’d have a sort of live, superb visual to inspire you to keep the code moving forward.

Who knew source code would turn out to be so visually inspiring? (Now I just need a new way of visualizing me writing bad code and then correcting and cleaning it up. I think it could be best represented as a set of stick figures getting stuck in quicksand and hitting each other over the head. Then there could be a big Smoke Monster that represented the Evil Force of Procrastination.)

But wait! There’s more! You can visualize web logs, too. (It works with Apache; I have to see if I can make it work with our nginx logs, as visualizers could actually be very beneficial with the kind of complex data you get in something like a web log):

Adobe announced their Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Global Online Launch Event. Pretty soon we will see all the new feature of Illustrator CS5. Register so you can watch the event April 12, 2010 on Adobe TV. What are you hoping to see in the new version of Illustrator?

From Adobe

“With the right tools, your creative horizon changes. A tree is still timber, but suddenly in a whole new way. Old ideas germinate again, and new ideas branch into unexpected opportunities. Welcome to Adobe® Creative Suite® 5—software that will allow you to confidently reach more people, more effectively, in more places, with whatever masterpiece you can imagine.”

Event Timing

Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Global Online Launch Event 8am PDT/11amEDT/ 5pm CEST April 12, 2010 on Adobe TV

Register for the exclusive Global Online Launch Event, Monday, April 12, 2010.

Boards Interactive Magazine – Walkthrough from Theo Watson on Vimeo.

Augmented reality has inspired plenty of experiments, magazines included – some successful, some failing to get far beyond the gimmick. What’s nice about this work is that it introduces the concept of motion to the typically-static pages of print, and inspires readers to imagine a world beyond the bounds of the page. There’s also an elegant expression of the theme.

It’s all made with OpenFrameworks (again – yes, OF is one of the easiest ways to hook into augmented reality). And none other than Theo Watson was involved.

For the March 2010 issue of Boards Magazine, Emily Gobeille and I worked with Nexus Productions to develop an interactive cover experience called Rise and Fall. Here is a little preview of the experience.

You can download the software and the cover from: boardsmag.com/RiseAndFall

Update: Found out you can buy a copy of the magzine for $7 by emailing – BoardsCustomerCare@boardsmag.com . You can also download the cover as a pdf from the link above.

The project uses the Ferns library for tracking ( cvlab.epfl.ch/software/ferns/index.php ) and the whole project is open source released under the GPL v2.0 . Grab the source code here: boardsmag.com/RiseAndFall

Credits:

Digital Directors:
Emily Gobeille – zanyparade.com
Theo Watson – theowatson.com

Produced by:
Nexus Productions – nexusproductions.com

Sound Design:
MOST Original Soundtracks – m-ost.nl

Software:
Made with openFrameworks – openframeworks.cc
Using the Ferns library for tracking – cvlab.epfl.ch/software/ferns/index.php

Thanks to @wetterberg via Twitter for sending this our way.

An almost perfect example of some deep and subtle work with a flexible tool, creating magical results:

Ólafur Arnalds – Ljósið (Official Music Video) from Erased Tapes on Vimeo.

If you’ve spent any length of time with Particular, you’ll recognize this instantly. The look of the Spherical Field and spread lines of particles when the emitter moves quickly are unmistakable. Software quirks aside, this really is spectacular looking work for such a simple tool. The colour, depth of field and organic movement are truly beautiful, and it showcases Particular 2.0’s composition light shading to lovely effect.

The piece was originally created by Esteban Diacono as an animation test, using one of the tracks from Icelandic artist Ólafur Arnalds‘ Found Songs project, and was subsequently picked up as the official video for the track.

Esteban answered some questions about the production in the comments for his original piece:
It uses After Effects, Particular 2.0, and SoundKeys, with a smattering of Starglow.
The particles are standard particular Spheres and Cloudlets.
The cast shadows aren’t native to Particular, but are created as a separate layer, blurred and masked.
It took 11 hours to render at 720p on a Core2 Duo with 4GB RAM.