Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Saturday, June 19, 2010
David O'Reilly on animating movement
I think the bit on movement trajectories in animation is brilliant. Natural human movements also follow this kind of smooth trajectory; studies of motor planning (eg here) have found that this sort of movement is optimally designed to minimize energy expenditure. It’s so great when artists figure out how to convey different feelings just by making these subtle tweaks to the textures and physics of the real world, I think it can really tell us a lot about our own perception.
Also: vectorpunk? Seriously, BoingBoing? Vectorpunk.
Labels:
art,
modeling,
neuroscience
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Ryan
From the video description: "Ryan" is based on the life of Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator who, 30 years ago, produced some of the most influential animated films of his time. In the film, we hear the voices of prominent animators and artists discussing Ryan's work, and from waitresses, mission-house caretakers and homeless people who make up Ryan's life. These voices speak through strange, twisted, and disembodied computer-generated characters--which combine to reflect the film's creator, Chris Landreth. In the words of Anais Nin, "We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are."
First saw this at the end of my senior year in high school, the year it won the Oscar for best short animated film. Ryan Larkin himself received renewed attention following this film's success, and gave up some of his bad habits to briefly resume his career in animation before dying of lung cancer in early 2007.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Kadykchan, Russia -- the Phantom City

Kadykchan is a Russian city located way the hell up in the Siberian peninsula, where the winter air temperature could drop below -40 degrees Celsius. In spite of these conditions, the city had a population of around 10,000 in 1986, when it was a tin-mining town for the Soviet Union. But when a pipe burst in the city's central boiler house, the whole city lost heat and everyone quickly evacuated-- and between this and the decline of its tin mines after the fall of the USSR, Kadykchan never recovered. As of 2008 the population was estimated to be less than 300 people; the city is still full of the abandoned possessions of those who fled.
For more photos, see this post on the impressive Russian blog Brusnichka, which seems to be dedicated largely to exploring and photographing abandoned bits of Russia (and there's even more up on English Russia). I linked Brusnichka's photos from an abandoned Russian army neuroscience lab here almost a year ago (my second post here, in fact) but never thought to explore the site in more depth. Like most of Russia, the site now seems to be abandoned-- but what remains of the content is beautiful. I like this this and this for starters.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Vladislav Delay -- Lumi
Good stuff. The video reminds me a bit of David ORielly's work, I like how the old mechanical quirks of early CG (flickering landscapes, stark textures, rigid movement, low polygon counts) are now being used aesthetically-- like impressionist painters intentionally using visible brush strokes, turning a flaw of their medium into a feature of their work.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Rite of Spring
On a bit of a modernism kick; really such interesting stuff. Quoth Peter Childs (from wikipedia), "There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair." Or as Fitzgerald put it (at 23, goddamn I feel like an underachiever now), a generation "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."
So anyway, here's the Rite of Spring:
And here's a snip of a documentary on the music.
So anyway, here's the Rite of Spring:
And here's a snip of a documentary on the music.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Ferrofluid Friday
An old video, but still fun. Dynamic sculpture using electromagnets + sound waves + magnetic fluid.
Labels:
art,
mad science
Monday, September 7, 2009
The New Settlers of Detroit

The economic recession has taken a particularly heavy toll on the American auto industry, and cities like Detroit which were once central to the industry have been gutted by job losses and home foreclosures in the past year. This effect has been so extreme that property in Detroit must practically be given away: Yahoo Real Estate shows dozens of homes around the city selling for mere hundreds of dollars. And still the population of Detroit, a city designed to support roughly 2 million people, has dwindled to less than a million, while the shutdown of many supermarket chains has created a food desert in the city.
Detroit's plight has been well covered in the news, and organizations are already forming to take advantage of the area's collapsed economy. Artists, sustainability enthusiasts, survivalists, and hippie-types in general are coordinating the mass purchase and transformation of land in and around the city. And since this recession coincides with a period of increased interest in locally-grown produce and sustainability, many efforts have a heavy focus on urban farming-- a fact which has received attention from Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture, the Beeb, and NPR among others.
Naturally there's a lot of hype surrounding the whole thing, and it will be interesting to see how this new influx impacts the culture of the city in coming years. For further reading, here are a few people and organizations currently involved in settling the area and documenting their impact:
- Andrew Kemp is a resident of East Detroit who has bought up five lots in his neighborhood and is now farming four of them
- Urban Farming is an NPO which farms vacant lots in Detroit and gives collected produce to the needy
- Detroit UnReal Estate Agency is a group which tracks cultural development in Detroit and inventories cheap property in the area
- the Yes Farm is a collective of artists and urban farmers living and creating in Detroit
- the Power House Project is a social art project attempting to develop an efficient, sustainable home in the city for under $99,000
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
TinEye

TinEye is a reverse image search engine-- ie you upload a picture from your computer and it'll look for sites that use that picture. Seems to work pretty well, though sadly it was unable to tell me where the above picture came from-- it's been sitting orphaned on my PC for ages. Their Cool Searches page shows some examples of what the site is capable of in terms of image recognition-- impressive stuff. Similar to this, Google has a Similar Images search function, which seems to work pretty well but doesn't seem to support searching uploaded images so far.
Hmm, I wonder what it'd take to make a content search for music-- I'm not sure how input to the search would work, but it'd be an interesting project just to study feature/melody extraction from mp3s. Most music has some sort of regular structure: could you automatically find the hook or the chorus of a pop song? Maybe make a filter that converts complex orchestral sound to pure tones, or even generates sheet music from sound files? Time to do some digging.
Labels:
art,
art resources,
knowledge management,
technology
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Photos of Decay in Detroit and Chernobyl
Like the title says. Here's:
A flikr photoset of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository (read the backstory in the blog post here)
and Kiddofspeed.com, photos taken from a motorcycle trip through the dead zone of Chernobyl. (Looks like there's some argument over whether it's real, but it is an interesting site nonetheless.)
A flikr photoset of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository (read the backstory in the blog post here)
and Kiddofspeed.com, photos taken from a motorcycle trip through the dead zone of Chernobyl. (Looks like there's some argument over whether it's real, but it is an interesting site nonetheless.)
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Machine with Wishbone
"Caught in a symbiotic relationship, both the wishbone and the machine are unable to manifest fully without the other. We drag our pasts with us and move according to unseen forces. More and more, we interface with the world through our mental and technological creations."
View more of Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculptures on his YouTube channel.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Mayang's Free Texture Library
Mayang's Free Texture Library is a great source of high-res textures and some object stock. A lot of the images in the man-made, metal, and nature sections make nice texture overlays to add some depth and, um, texture to digital artwork.
See this page for one method for applying these images as texture overlays in photoshop.
See this page for one method for applying these images as texture overlays in photoshop.
Labels:
art,
art resources
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Please Say Something
Please Say Something - Full Length from David OReilly on Vimeo.
A troubled relationship between a Cat and Mouse set in the distant Future. Winner of the Golden Bear for best short film at the 2009 Berlinale. (Click the link for full view.) His other stuff is pretty cool too, like When You're Smiling and the video he did for Venetian Snares.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Color Palettes
Two beautiful color resources for artists:
Color Scheme Designer lets you play around with a color wheel to generate color palettes based around single colors or sets of complimentary colors, and includes a tool to preview websites designed with your generated color schemes.
ColourLovers.com is a site where users can post and rank color swatches, palettes, and patterns.
Color Scheme Designer lets you play around with a color wheel to generate color palettes based around single colors or sets of complimentary colors, and includes a tool to preview websites designed with your generated color schemes.
ColourLovers.com is a site where users can post and rank color swatches, palettes, and patterns.
Labels:
art,
art resources
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Kowloon Walled City

Found a fantastic blog post on Coilhouse (go read for more details and nifty video), on Kowloon Walled City-- a dystopian monolith of overgrown urbanization which existed in anarchic limbo in the middle of Hong Kong between 1945 and 1993.
Kowloon's bizarre state of lawlessness attracted thousands of people-- drug dealers, unlicensed dentists, entrepreneurs, refugees-- and the city's population boomed to a high of 50,000, making it one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. Thousands of makeshift expansions were built to cope with the growing population, and the city developed into 14-story monolith, a place where sunlight rarely reached street level and denizens drilled down to tap into water pipes from surrounding regions of Hong Kong. The city was evacuated in the early 90's and demolished in 1993, but its legacy now lives on in popular culture-- it is the basis of dozens of dystopian cities created in movies, books, and video games. Quality of life and sanitation were poor, but the reported crime rate was low, and many small shop owners found it a city of unique opportunity.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Tom Gauld on Flickr

Tom Gauld has recently started a flickr stream, mostly for the ballpoint pen cartoons he draws for the Guardian; also check out more art on his website. Some of my favorites include this, this, this, and this.
Labels:
art
Monday, January 12, 2009
Café Le Sélect
Rick Tulka on Flickr: lovely drawings of patrons at a French cafe. Some of my favorites so far are here, here, here, and here. I swear that first one is one of my professors.
Labels:
art
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Morbid Anatomy
Morbid Anatomy-- "Surveying the Interstices of Art and Medicine, Death and Culture." A blog which showcases antique anatomical specimens and art, and a great resource for related websites and museums.
Labels:
art,
blogs,
mad science
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)