Squarely in the “because you can” category: YouDisco is a research project at New York’s Eyebeam that simultaneously streams up to eight YouTube videos onto a rotating virtual disco ball. Frame rate is … well, impressive given what it’s doing. The project is the work of Jennifer Jacobs at Eyebeam “with the help of Jeff Crouse.”
What is interesting about this is that you do get interesting effects on a computer screen when you leave 4:3 rectangles behind, just as in projection.
Along the same lines, though focused on a mash-up of two videos side by side (sometimes to hilarious effect):
8-bit chip music went mainstream in the last few years. Well, now it’s video compression’s turn. What, you thought crunchy blippy glitch sounds were cool, but that video could only look crap when over-compressed digitally? Too late: even Kanye West is doing it now.
The music video getting the most blogosphere airplay comes from Chairlift. Chairlift’s “Evident Utensil” is a music video made of datamosh errors - a twisted visual special effect formed from an algorithmic anomaly. You’ve seen it before, and like many of us, were as fascinated by these digital artifacts as you were by the patterns your NES made when the carts got dusty and the VHS’s when you taped one few too many Cinemax feature presentations. Of course, because this is pieced together from compression artifacts, it looks even more horrible compressed, so you need the HD version. As the uploader says:
NORMAL QUALITY LOOKS LIKE BUNK. clink on “WATCH IN HD” to WATCH IN HD!!! HD stands for “HOLY DATAMOSH,” which is what G-D bestowed upon us in the form of a MASSIVE COMPUTER GLITCH that eats up INDIE MUSIC VIDEOS and turns them into INTERNET GOLD. See the gold in its purest form at: http://www.court13.com/Chairlift-EvidentUtensil.mov
But don’t think for a second this is going to stay some obscure “Internet” thing. No, media moves too fast for that now. Enter Kanye West. As Jeremy Elder writes on his blog shape+colour:
Datamoshing is the new tiltshift. I guarantee. Now it’s just a matter of who’ll do it well and which big company will soullessly made a campaign out of it “because the kids think it’s ‘dope.’”
Then you discover a visual wormhole full of datamosh. After all, YouTube’s “related” feature is only going to pull up more digital nonsense. And so you dive in — and the vids with 300 counts turn out to be way more interesting.
Facebook is becoming a nice little hang for visualists – I’ve actually sorted a gig or two on the service. Now, “give a gift” apps are a meme unto themselves, but you certainly haven’t seen one like this.
Zac Darko writes:
I recently made the worlds first (maybe) VJ app on Facebook, thought you’d think it was cool.
I love the hardware lineup on Zac’s app, though, um, I think we also need to invent some new lust-worthy visualist gear to fill out the lineup. Much as I love some of these choices, we’re a bit behind the synth side (which I can say with confidence as an aficionado of both).
Of course, if anyone (ahem, Edirol) wants to send me a CG-8 or high-end mixer, really, I can save you some time. Skip the Facebook app and send me the real thing. I’m sure you’ll find it far more convenient to do it that way.
Zac has his own blog going, too, with some great little gems. Thanks, mate!
Online remix contests are all the rage these days. User-generated content is becoming this decade’s latest annoying buzzword. But visualist engineer Marco Hinic took a different approach. He didn’t create one video remix. He created an app that can create endless video remixes. Nine Inch Nails Ghosts, meet random visual mash-ups from Creative Commons-licensed online videos. Marco describes the effort:
A few days ago I released the web site ghostss.com; it’s my entry to the NIN Ghosts Film Festival.
It’s an online video remixing application. It builds playlists describing a mix of videos with effects and renders them as an .flv Flash Video file. All the content is on the web site — around 1 gig of video loops and a few mp3’s from NIN music.
In accordance to NIN music, all Videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.
The web site is a mix of c++, php and javascript for the client side. Basically the client builds a playlist with video references and effects, the playlist is translated into an xml request that is sent to the web site. The video mixer on the web site render the request into an flv or mp4 file that is then played to the client.
Yep, you read that right: it’s a website coded in C++.
A Swarm of Angels just announced they’ve released an “open source trailer” — that is, with a Creative Commons license for remixing — for their upcoming collaborative sci fi thriller film. The trailer already demonstrates some of the fruits of this collaborative effort from around the planet.
Apologies for the copy and paste, but I’ve got a train to catch and they say it quite eloquently, so here you go:
I’m proud to release the first open source film trailer created for A Swarm of Angels. World’s Will Shatter sets the scene for The Unfold, a contemporary sci-fi thriller being made in a revolutionary fashion; by a global community of members participating in its creation, and contributing their unique talents and skills.
Driven by a core collaboration between the animation skills of Mayec Rancel, and the soundtrack smarts of Santiago Abadia, the trailer is at the forefront of new creative processes empowered through the Internet of crowdsourcing, and peer production. Finished with title design by the internationally recognised graphic talents of Matt Pyke of Universal Everything collaborating with Maxim Zhestkov, it is a stunning glimpse into a world being created by a global membership fueling a pioneering people-powered film studio.
Rancel has evoked a powerful unfolding world created in 3D from 2D images created by Japanese photographer Palla. Through community feedback and discussion at the forums of aswarmofangels.com the initial ideas developed into a spiralling, shearing cityscape synchronised with an otherworldly soundtrack developed by Abadia. The online collaboration encompassed a team of participants from Spain, Belgium, the North and South of England, Japan, as well as Russia (not including members who participated in votes and posts via the forums).
The trailer and all accompanying source files are released under a Creative Commons CC-NC-SA-3.0 license, allowing full non-commercial remixing and sharing (embed codes for Youtube, blip.tv & hi-def Vimeo). Join the Swarm to help make the film and get further details for the open source package (register here, full member details here).
Anyone from CDMotion involved in this project? Impressions on the first results? Considering getting involved? Say so in comments.
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