Micro-origami sculptures unfolding in water through capillary action: “
Etienne Cliquet’s ‘Flottille’ shows ‘micro-origami’ of 2-3cm sheets of paper, intricately cut and folded, being placed in water; the sculptures draw the water in by capillary action and gracefully unfold.
(via Kottke)
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Wood is good: beautiful NTT Docomo ad for TV in Japan: “
[Video Link] Matt Alt says, ‘This television ad for NTT Docomo came out right around the time of the earthquake, so it got lost in the news. But it’s really beautiful — and quintessentially Japanese.’ The YouTube metadata says, ‘No CG or tape-cut. Four days spent.’
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Partitura: Mesmerizing Music Visualization Software: “
What neurological phenomena have to do with software and the future of live performance experiences.
Music visualization deeply fascinates and inspires me, from how it’s manifested in outlier phenomena like synesthesia to how it’s codified in the visual language of music notation to how it’s leveraged in artistic expression. Partitura explores this topic from a software standpoint with spellbinding generative real-time graphics that visualize sound. A collaboration between London-based visual artist Quayola and music visualization artists Pedro Mari and Natan Sinigaglia, the software churns out endless, mesmerizing, ever-evolving abstract shapes that can respond both the structure of recorded music and manual gestural inputs.
Partitura aims to create a new system for translating sound into visual forms. Inspired by the studies of artists such as Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oscar Fischinger and Norman McLaren, the images generated by Partitura are based on a precise and coherent system of relationships between various types of geometries.” ~ Quayola
Partitura feels like a three-dimensional version of the wonderful Soy Tu Aire, equal parts fluid and vibrant, with incredible potential for live performances and multisensory ambient experiences.
via Create Digital Motion via ArtsTech News
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I’ve cited McKenna a lot over the years. The last of the great American magical thinkers, at least for a while – no-one’s followed him with any success, although many, both genuine apostles and creepy chancers, have tried. The last half of his life was pretty much a public exegesis, trying to quantify and contextualise his drug experiences in the same way that Philip K Dick obsessively wrote his own self-interrogative Exegesis document. He sometimes conflated his UFO experience with his fascination with psylocibin, conflating it with the neurochemical payload of the mushroom. Even his visualisation of the UFO, as a classic George Adamski vehicle, has something of the bemushroomed about it.
Two things to note about McKenna’s experience. One, he sat in a very particular place, on the advice of a local contact, and told to watch a very specific portion of the sky. UFO appearances were apparently semi-regular in this area. I don’t know exactly where McKenna was, but neighbouring Chile and Peru sit on the join between the Nazca and South American tectonic plates… and while central Brazilian “mid-plate events” are supposedly fairly rare, they do happen, and they can happen deep in the remote Amazon forest. I like to imagine the young McKenna sitting in the Amazon basin without a clue that he was actually in some vast electromagnetic well, the South American plate beneath his feet flexing and cracking under weird torsion… and then there is strange weather, there are earthlights, and Terence McKenna’s magnetically-boiled temporal lobe sees whatever’s throwing itself out of the ground as burning hauntology, as a ghost of space, as memories of the future…
(Nazca, of course, bears on its plains huge geoglyphs that Erich von Daniken claimed, in his book CHARIOTS OF THE GODS, could be nothing less than airfield markings for alien spacecraft.)
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Religions: “
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Beautiful, out-of-phase pendulums: “
This Harvard physics apparatus uses a series of pendulums of varying lengths, swinging together, to make a mesmerizing dance:
The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The length of each successive shorter pendulum is carefully adjusted so that it executes one additional oscillation in this period. Thus, the 15th pendulum (shortest) undergoes 65 oscillations.
Our apparatus was built from a design published by Richard Berg [Am J Phys 59(2), 186-187 (1991)] at the University of Maryland. The particular apparatus shown here was built by our own Nils Sorensen.
(via Kottke)
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Fun video about artists in Marfa, TX: “
[Video Link] Happy mutants are everywhere, even in Marfa, TX.
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Itty Bitty Critter Committee to join human astronauts on Shuttle Endeavour: “
Oh, sure, human astronauts will be on board Space Shuttle Endeavour’s STS-134 mission set to launch Monday. But so will five microscopic life forms: Water Bears, also known as Tardigrades (shown above); the bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans and Bacillus subtilis; and the archaea Haloarcula marismortui and Pyrococcus furiosus. More about ‘Shuttle LIFE’ here, via the Planetary Society.
Tardigrades image via Google Knol.
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Caturday: Cats in Tanks (video): “
Cats in Tanks from Whitehouse Post on Vimeo.
(via Tara McGinley)
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