Bizarro Blog has a troubling hilarious new take on the phrase ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.’ A picture is worth a thousand words and this one speaks volumes.
Below is another illustration from Bizarro illustrating our obsession with electronic devices. Sort of sad, eh?
(via The High Definite)
Here’s a fun look at the history of computer graphics from an early ‘70s perspective. I’m sorta digging the music and the “futuristic” trippy designs. Enjoy!
(via HYST)
This is stunning.
Shot using a Nokia camera outfitted with a microscope attachment called the Cellscope, we follow Dot, a 9mm stop motion animated girl, as she races through a super miniature world.
This is rather brilliant! YouTube user bd594 describes his inspiration below:
This is dedicated to all fans of The B-52’s who are also known as the “Worlds Greatest Party Band”. This idea has been simmering in my mind for the last couple of years and after many months of procrastinating it is finally complete. I was also motivated to finish my robot band after seeing a YouTube Video from “The Trons” from New Zealand.
The Bit-52’s consist of:
Fred’s Vocals - TI99/4a computer, speech synthesizer and terminal emulator ii module
Kate and Cindy’s Vocals - Two HP Scanjet 3C scanners, UBunto and sjetplay written by NuGanjaTron
The Guitar, Keyboard, Cow Bell, Cymbal and Tambourine are all controlled by various types of push/pull solenoinds for a total of 23. The Solenoids are powered by four ULN2803 darlington drivers and everything is controlled by two PIC16F84A microcontrollers
(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)
What a brilliant antidote to the current highly lame trend of attempted personalised music selection software (Pandora,etc). This Brian Whitman fellow has got it right (even though he’s admittedly part of the problem, ha!). These services are only going to point you in the direction of some major label hackery you’d never notice on your own, anyways. Nothing will ever beat word of mouth and the recommendations of friends and relatives with excellent taste. Let the deletions begin !
I have a strong aversion to music recommenders and music similarity services. I especially deal with a lot of cognitive dissonance as the company I co-founded makes a lot of $$$$$ (that is 5 dollar signs) selling ordered lists of artists to multinational music streaming conglomerates.
Nonetheless, we recently completed our first live recommender system (to be announced near the Boston Music Hack day in October) and to perhaps get myself more comfortable with a future in which children will no longer ask their cooler older dope-smoking brothers what to listen to in lieu of some HTML table in a UL, I decided to really sign up wholesale to this movement. If we rely on these computer programs to learn about music, well we might as well rely on them to fix the sins of our past and delete the crap we are obviously not meant to listen to anymore.
“Future of Music (2010)” is a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore based on your preferences. It then helpfully deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive. Skips the recycle bin. Just like other recommender systems, it uses a lot of fancy math (and data from Echo Nest and last.fm) that really doesn’t matter in the end. Just click the button and let it take care of your life. I want it to also delete scrobbles and spotify playlists that feature the artists. Maybe it should read your email too and tell you who you shouldn’t talk to anymore, i could use that
One of the aural drivers of the 20th century—and the bane of many traditionalist stick-men—the drum machine has a rather undersung legacy.
The first drum machine was invented in the early ‘30s by Leon Theremin on commission from Henry Cowell.
The biggest one was recently built and toured around Stockholm by Propellerheads, the Swedish bad boys behind Reason music software. Kids stomped on it, and its interface was projected onto a big-ass building downtown. Bring that thing over here!
Wow! This is pretty crazy, unexpected and a wee bit creepy. Watch.
At this weekend London Electronic Festival (LED) Aphex Twin used live facial recognition to map the audience and overlay images of his own, trademark distorted face. Mesmerising and disturbing in equal measure!
(via Nerdcore)
Noah Scalin, known for creating a skull a day over the course of a year, recently created a massive one made of human brain slices for Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum.
Noah describes working with the museum’s curator and the process of creating his fascinating work of art:
Anna, the curator, asked if I could make a new skull for an upcoming project of theirs and of course I said yes, and then suggested that I make it in the museum itself. Since most of the items on display are very fragile I figured I’d be working with display jars or other non-historical materials. However, to my delight they had just acquired a collection of hundreds of beautiful real brain slices encased in acrylic (which had been dubbed “Zombie MRE’s”)! Since they’re very sturdy I was allowed to used them as my material and I was set up in a lovely room that holds the card catalog for their library. Over the course of two days I arranged the slices on two large old library tables and climbed a ladder over and over making sure the image looked right from a single vantage point (where I would eventually take my picture). All told I used 375 slices and a bit of fabric for the eye/nose holes…
As someone who has a thing for craniums and mandibles, I find this pretty damn exciting.
You can purchase Noah’s book ‘Skulls’ here.
Interview with Noah Scalin after the jump…
Sure, everyone loves a good ultra time-stretched pop tune. All the kids are doing it. Now you can make your own! I’m fairly sure that it’ll come out sounding the same regardless of what you feed into it, but I had fun playing with the OSX version.
The one that started it all after the jump…