Notes

Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!

  • Extemeties Skateboard Video

    Music – Blackbird Blackbird “Pure” // http://blackbirdblackbird.bandcamp.com

    Skateboarding – Aryeh Kraus

    Director: Eli Stonberg // http://elistonberg.com
    Executive Producer: Danielle Hinde
    Commissioner: Sara Greene
    Producer: Josh Fruehling
    Director of Photography: Ross Riege
    Camera Operator: Hermes Marco
    Camera Operator: Ariana Natale
    Editor: Eli Stonberg
    Asst Editor: Josh Sasson
    PA: Jackson Hoose

    Produced by Doomsday Entertainment // http://www.doomsdayent.com
    In Association with The Masses // http://www.wearethemasses.com
    Thanks to The Idealists // http://theidealists.com
    Created for Burn // www.burn.com

    Extremities: six GoPro cameras attached to the skateboarder’s arms, legs, head, and one mounted underneath the deck (my favorite), combined with a couple of static cameras for context. Between this and the hula hoop video, these little cameras are cranking out some fascinating new perspectives this week.

  • Onion AV Club: “Electric like Dick Hyman”: 170 Beastie Boys references explained

    This list has been making the rounds for a couple of weeks now, but I’m just getting to it. Pretty thorough, but Marsha was sad to see no mention of the Frugal Gourmet! If you need more ‘splainin’  about their allusive lyrics or samples, you might try the even more comprehensive BeastieMania Song Spotlight, which ought to keep you busy for a long, long while.

  • 26 Terabit-per-second Laser

    Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology set a new record by transmitting 26 terabits of a data per second (“the entire Library of Congress in 10 seconds!” as the usual benchmark goes) using a single laser and a clever FFT and frequency comb technique to split the light into 300+ discrete colors:

    The Fourier transform is a well-known mathematical trick that can in essence extract the different colours from an input beam, based solely on the times that the different parts of the beam arrive. The team does this optically – rather than mathematically, which at these data rates would be impossible – by splitting the incoming beam into different paths that arrive at different times, recombining them on a detector. In this way, stringing together all the data in the different colours turns into the simpler problem of organising data that essentially arrive at different times.

    Neat.

    (Via ACM TechNews)

  • We were basically trying to see if we could get each other to drop out of school.

    Mike Monteiro of Mule Design on attending art school:

    But the skill I picked up in school that turned out to be the most valuable was learning how to take a punch. We had these insane critiques where we’d trash each other viciously. We took pride in how brutal we could be to one another. I think it went way beyond constructive. It was an art form in itself. We were basically trying to see if we could get each other to drop out of school. And professors were the worst—we had one guy who’d slash paintings, which is completely devastating, right? I mean you work your ass off on something and your teacher just walks up to it and literally rips it to shreds. It’s kind of magnificent. And afterwards, we’d all go off and drink and have sex with another. But those critiques taught me how to not take criticism personally. It was always about the work. And if the work quality wasn’t there you were marked for demolition.

    Yep, sounds about right. The ability to take (and work from) criticism was one of the few life-skills I directly picked up from my undergraduate art background, too.

    No one ever literally slashed my paintings, but one professor did tell us during a mid-semester critique that he thought the class’s work as a whole was like “a giant ball of shit rolling downhill, getting bigger.” Fun times!

    (Hat tip to Austin Kleon)

  • RIP Macho Man

    RIP Macho Man. Few people exemplified the XTREME!!!! 1990s marketing aesthetic quite so well.

  • Fleischer Popeye 3d Backgrounds

    Dave Fleischer of Fleischer Studios demos the distorted-architecture-on-a-turntable that his studio pioneered for creating compelling 3D backgrounds in their animated shorts. You can see it in motion in a number of their Popeye cartoons (like Popeye Meets Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) or in their originals like Mr. Bug Goes to Town (PS: check out that awesome title card typography!)

    If you happen to be in L.A. this week, you can catch some classic Fleischer shorts in pristine 35mm prints as part of Jerry Beck’s animation series at the Cinefamily. Do it!

    (Via Cartoon Brew)

  • “There’ll Always Be a Place for Me at the Dairy Queen”

     

    [Alas, my best GIF has disappeared after MLKSHK shut down…]

    As I said before, Parker Posey grilling a single chicken wing is one of my favorite funnysad scenes committed to film. And now I’ve committed it to an animated GIF.

  • Salman Rushdie on Ai Weiwi

    The lives of artists are more fragile than their creations. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus to a little hell-hole on the Black Sea called Tomis, but his poetry has outlasted the Roman Empire. Osip Mandelstam died in a Stalinist work camp, but his poetry has outlived the Soviet Union. Federico García Lorca was killed by the thugs of Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but his poetry has survived that tyrannical regime.

    We can perhaps bet on art to win over tyrants. It is the world’s artists, particularly those courageous enough to stand up against authoritarianism, for whom we need to be concerned, and for whose safety we must fight.

    From Salman Rushdie’s op-ed “Dangerous Arts” in today’s New York Times, on Ai Weiwei’s arrest and detention by Chinese authorities, a matter of human rights urgency.
  • Bit.Trip.Runner Blind Gamer

    Mechanical engineering student Terry Garret plays through a few levels of Bit.Trip.Runner, one of my favorite games of the past year. It’s a very challenging game, with simple actions but difficult timings that are set to fun 8-music and sound effects.

    Oh, by the way, Terry is completely blind.

  • Arthouse Fissures

    With the Austin Museum of Art shuttering their downtown location, the city’s crackdown on home/studio spaces on the east side, the House voting to gut the funding for the Texas Commission for the Arts, and the recent news that Art Lies is ceasing publication, what could make this a bleaker month for central Texas art?

    Arthouse, the 100-year-old Austin-based organization I’ve been proud to support since the days when it was still called the Texas Fine Arts Association, is beginning to show  signs of fracture, despite their beautiful new façade. You can get the bigger story over at Austin360 if you’ve missed it in the news, but to summarize: exhibited art has been mishandled and censored, their admired and successful curator was fired abruptly (possibly after having written a letter of concern to the director about the above-mentioned mishandling), and some of their prominent board members and staff members have resigned in protest. There’s also a growing collective voice of concern by the artists who were to be contributing work to the upcoming 5×7 fundraising show (myself included). So far, apart from short responses directly to inquiring reporters, I don’t believe that Arthouse has issued a statement on the matter, which isn’t especially good PR in my humble opinion.

    Eric Zimmerman has a nice summary of the concerns on his cablegram blog:

    No one would argue against a new building, or at very least a renovation. But when you dump truckloads of cash into a designer building and neglect to budget for a curator, the person who puts the actual art in the Arthouse, there seems to be some serious priority issues. I said it before, a building is nice and all, but what you show in that building is where the rubber meets the road. I’d love to see art organizations forgo the starchitect buldings and put money into paying artists, curators, and their staff instead.

    For the curatorial angle (or perhaps, the “lack of curator”), you might be interested in Wendy Vogel’s take over on …might be good.

    Here’s to hoping that Arthouse can steer itself back on track as the leading space for contemporary art in Austin.