Who would have imagined seeing a music video on Google Code? Welcome to the new age of data visualization.

Radiohead’s new video uses 3D images capture from two scanners – one a close-proximity 3D scanner from Geometric Informatics, another a multiple-laser array for the “exterior scenes” rotating in a 360-degree pattern. That yields just data, not anything you can look at, so the artists created the video itself using the open-source tool we love so much, Processing (site | CDM tag).

Cool so far. But the interesting part is that the tools and data are open-sourced and/or freely available:

View the data visualization in 3D and navigate with the mouse

Download the data in CSV form and do stuff with it using Processing source code and instructions

There’s a remix-friendly license in there, and a YouTube group to follow the results.

All the relevant links, plus the video itself:

RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS [ Google Code ]

It’s also striking to notice that, despite the new-fangled technologies, the face stuff is remarkably similar in actual visual effect to the Rutt-Etra video synth (see also stories on Rutt-Etra restoration, Bill Etra restrospective). The process is entirely different: the Rutt-Etra processed the image directly via raster manipulations, whereas the Radiohead video is really a visualization of 3D data. But in some ways, I find the 1972 effect more appealing, and the visual relationship I believe is intentional.

Then again, part of the power of data visualization is that you can make it look like whatever you want. So it’ll be interesting to see how these techniques evolve.

Director: James Frost (Zoo Films)

Director of Photography: Von Thomas (Zoo Films)

Director of Technology: Aaron Koblin (whose work we’ve admired at the MOMA Design and the Elastic Mind show, via the now-defunct Yahoo Design Innovation Team, and elsewhere)

Various political remix videos have climbed their way up the YouTube charts, including many forcing soon-to-be-former President Bush to sing various songs. But is interest in the activity enough to warrant an entire online community dedicated to the topic? The creators of the new site RemixAmerica.org, launching in beta today, think so.

With YouTube already a popular hub for bizarre political remixes, RemixAmerica tries to bring some extra features to the table. They upload content to use, from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (really) to “I Have a Dream” to current figures. Seen John McCain’s "summer of love" ad? Click "remix," and it’s yours, for editing via an online tool in basic or advanced versions or in your own editor of choice. The site also hosts discussions, enabling video remixers and vloggers to communicate with one another. There’s even a feature that allows you to “talk back” with your webcam – so if you don’t want to bother remixing that McCain ad to the song “Age of Aquarius,” you can just shout at your screen instead.

The site has quite a founder behind it — none other than progressive activist and TV legend Norman Lear. Lear, creator of The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and All in the Family was also a political activist. He filmed a celebrity-laden dramatic reading of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, founded People for the American Way, and frequently used TV as a political weapon for advocacy. (Photo: mrfilms1)

Here’s Lear himself introducing the new site:

The remix tool itself is very cool – you can import videos straight from YouTube. Actual editing is tough, though, so I suspect people will stick to their trusted editors. But the community could be the thing that lets American visualists stay sane through the oncoming Presidential campaign.

You can certainly expect more of this sort of thing — Blair and Bush’s "love that dare not speak its name" was something many had observed, but perhaps it was more meaningful when it became musical.

There are some serious, high-profile indications that big artists are beginning to embrace alternative licensing for their content, whether it’s pay-what-you-wish distribution, “please remix this for us” marketing campaigns, or genuinely open content. Whether that’s just a brief fad or the sign of things to come, it’s too early to say. But R.E.M. have at least uploaded a full eleven videos, nicely encoded in MPEG4, under an open source license:

Supernatural Serious Album Page, with vids

R.E.M. Releases New Videos Under Open Source License [ReadWriteWeb, via vade]

R.E.M. aside, I wonder: will at least some VJs embrace open content, perhaps even exclusively?

Now, this isn’t without caveats:

You’ve got open source and public domain video footage, operating systems, software tools, photos (hello, Creative Commons flickr search), music … why not fonts, as well?

Open fonts are especially useful to visualists, because it means fonts can be freely embedded in web applications, remixed and edited, and otherwise abused.

Free Fonts of Fonts

My current favorite resource is Orgdot’s open source font page. If you love pixel/LED fonts, you’ll find some truly top-notch choices here, plus links to many, many other resources. Lovers of typography could easily spend a weekend doing nothing but creating animations and visuals out of the pixel fonts from this site and the various linked repositories:

Orgdot open source: pixel and LED fonts for Flash

I’ve got these pixel fonts specifically slated for some experiments with Processing. Could open source typography catch on the way Creative Commons / open source licenses have for other media? Possibly, but so far the efforts are a little immature. One of the best resources is Bitstream, which has open sourced its Vera font family:

Vera Open Source Fonts [Bitstream]