A video of composer Harry Partch demonstrating some of his innovative musical instruments, including the excellent 11-tone diamond marimba. Henry was an uncle of ex-Disney/Lantz animator Virgil Partch (aka VIP), a factoid I didn’t know until today!
Tag: video
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Composer Harry Partch Demonstrating Unique Instruments
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Vintage 3D Stop Motion Film of a Car Being Assembled
(video no longer available)
A vintage 3D stop motion film of a car being assembled, produced by Chrysler Motors (despite YouTube title, I think this is from later than 1939, when it was re-filmed in Technicolor). The springs must have been a pain to animate. Fun stuff! (via BoingBoing)
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Suzanne Ciani on 1980s Omni TV
(video no longer available)
A segment from the early 1980’s TV version of Omni magazine features electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani developing the chip-based vocalizer and music samples for the pinball table Xenon (her official site has much more about her work on Xenon’s sound if you’re interested). Found via the Make Blog (I think)
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A Brief Explanation of a Three Rotor Enigma Machine
A brief explanation of a three-rotor Enigma machine, the cryptographic device used by Nazi Germany during WWII to encode their communications. While the encryption technology had some flaws, it was largely broken by the Allies due to human mistakes made by the operators (not disposing of their key tables, writing down portions of the codes, captured hardware, etc).
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Vrgb VHS Visual Music Composition n.002
Some glitchy VCR-powered goodness. Via Rhizome.
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Miles Edgeworth: Turnabout Prosecutor First-Look
(video no longer available)
First localized video from the upcoming Phoenix Wright spinoff, “Miles Edgeworth: Turnabout Prosecutor”. Notable for the series is the move to adventure game-style sprites for the character interaction / investigation scenes. Watching this I realized what must be done: we need a hacked ROM of “Streets of Rage” with these sprites of Edgeworth, Gumshoe, and new “sidekick girl” character Kay replacing Alex, Adam, and Blaze! </videogame nerdery>
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Db We Used to Say Pirating I Mean the Term
DB: We used to say “pirating.” I mean, the term pirating was used for my early work.
CA: Was it really?
DB: Yeah. For example, when I started, there were no home-recording units. There was no TiVo. There was nothing like that.
CA: I must have been very difficult for you to get that footage.
DB: It was. There was no way to get the footage I needed directly. I had to find people inside the industry who believed in my artwork and were willing to get images out to me. So they called me a “pirateer” of imagery. That had a very romantic sound to it: “Oh, she’s the one who pirated imagery from television.”
Maybe this is the real difference between our generations. In pirating, originally, there was no way to talk back to the media. That’s why I did it. The stuff was coming one way at you, and there was no way to arrest it, stop the action, divert it, alter the vocabulary, or change the syntax.
From Do It 2, a conversation between Dara Birnbaum and Cory Arcangel. Artforum International XLVII, No. 7, p198 -
AR Record Scratching
Todd Vanderlin’s working on a project using OpenFrameworks and ARTag markers to simulate scratching a real record but using a camera as a the virtual needle. Nifty.
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An Appreciation of Ted Cassidy
(video no longer available)
Follow me. Ted Cassidy is one of my favorite sitcom actors. Few people seem to know that he also played “Thing” on the Addams Family tv show! (why the show’s producers got the 6’9″ guy to cram himself under whatever table / Victrola / box that Thing pops out of instead of just hiring a second actor, I don’t know)