According to this Guardian article – Monty Python DVD sales soar thanks to YouTube clips – up 16,000%(!) infact. The story goes that instead of going after all the people who have been uploading Monty Python clips over the years – They frankly don’t care and will give something back to the community by uploading lovely HD versions.
If you check out the official Monty Python youtube channel they reference this story in such a lovely way. It is witty and irreverant and the another example of a brand just letting go of copyright and reaping the financial benefits. They’ve nicely tagged up the videos to display links to amazon to buy the DVD thus earning an extra affiliate brucey bonus in the process – Very very simple and such an easy way to monetise their content.
For five nights this week, visitors to Trafalgar Square will be treated to spectacular illuminations covering the front of the National Gallery.
25 February – 1 March, 6–10pm
Picasso exhibition
You can also see real masterpieces by Picasso at the Gallery. The illuminations celebrate the opening of the National Gallery’s must-see exhibition ‘Picasso: Challenging the Past‘.
Interactive installation work is really becoming really interesting of late as more brands commision work and more design studios are born out of the frustration of working in one medium – really blurring the lines between art/architecture/design/interaction. A great way to introduce yourself to this world is with the upcoming Kinetica Art Fair.
Kinetica Art Fair is developed by Kinetica Museum in partnership with P3 and supported by the Contemporary Art Society.
More than 25 galleries and organisations specialising in kinetic, electronic and new media art are taking part with over 150 exhibiting artists. The Fair will be like no other with living, moving, speaking and performing art.
The Fair provides unparalleled opportunities for the public and collectors alike to view and buy work from this thriving international movement and to participate in the programme of talks, workshops and performances.
It’s on from friday 27th -> monday 2nd in London town and the lineup of speakers and performances looks great.
When you think you’ve seen it all, along comes a visual technique that really makes you sit up and take notice. ‘Datamoshing’ with its seriously terrible moniker, hit the mainstream recently with the new Kayne West ‘Welcome to heartbreak’ video. It breaks in from black into this riot of colour that is so blocky and compressed you think that youtube is actually broken. But it isn’t. It is the intent of the director who employs this techique of glitching out the video and blending the motion together to create something quite mesmerising.
But this effect isn’t new. It is very very very old. If you’ve every played a divx video without the right codec installed, you get these compression artifacts because your computer doesn’t understand how to render the video. I’ve seen it many times when you skip through a video and the frames start to ‘blend’ together, but never investigated if some bright spark had applied it in some creative way. Well, with the Kayne video coming to light, a lot of the design blogs are point towards David OReilly as being one of the first artists/directors to intentionally glitch video.
After immersing myself in the world of compression glitching I’m really loving how this technique instantly puts you on edge and unsettles you. Taking it further and glitching the edits or blowing the compression so much you can’t actually tell what you are looking at really makes you look harder. A brilliant way to subvert the medium.
The NY Times have recently released an API allowing developers to access a huge archive of news and data. This is a perfect example of how an open attitude to intellectual property increases brand awareness because people hack/mould/mash/visualise the data in interesting ways.
The brilliant Jer Thorp has starting putting together some stunning data visualisation with processing.
This is a visualization of the frequency of the words ’socialism’ (orange) and ‘capitalism’ (green) in New York Times articles since 1981.
This visualization reads like a clock. 12:01am is January 1st1984 and 11:59pm is January 1st 2009.
I actually didn’t enjoy the movie but at the time I thought the transformation of Benjamin over the years was astonishing seamless filmmaking. Being a geek I checked out the behind the scenes film created by Digital Domain, the company who provided the visual effects.
I then found stumbled upon a specfic site detailing more of the effects, makeup etc and I was amazed by the level of detail that the production has gone into to show how they created the effects. The realisation that for half of the film the Brad Pitt performance is CGI motion tracked onto other actors really does show there is no separation between realtity and hyper-reality. As the film proceeds, the de-aging process applied to Brad and Cate gives you a chill that film making has now moved into a new era of visual manipulation.
This certainly gives me hope that the forthcoming James Cameron film ‘Avatar‘ will be able to live up to the lofty claims of a photo-realistic CGI film.
Take an angelpoise, a webcam, a laptop and a book. Throw in some gorgeous illustration and a smattering of augmented reality and you have a beautiful way of animating reality.
What separates this from other augmented reality treaments is that there is no tracking marker present.
I seriously love the Mr Strings site. Everything is just a joy from the start – There are no instructions to guide through moulding your little avatar, just wacky sounds and a lovely playful interaction. Your little character whizzes into this little world where you can play with little games.
The art direction and sound direction are gorgeous and the level of detail in each screen is beautifully crafted. They did such a great job with the four screens it is a real shame the world wasn’t bigger or there was more of a level of interaction in this world.
A few small criticisms – Some of the games are quite hard to find but I can understand they wanted people to get the enjoyment from exploring. Also there are other little avatars moving in the world and I didn’t understand if these were controlled by other visitors to the site or not – Some interaction with these other avatars would have been great.
My last comment is on the lack of a ‘take-out’ from the site. I created this gorgeous little avatar and he had no way to burst out from the site – No ability to save as a wallpaper (mobile would be been great) – No way to share to a friend as perhaps a little widget or even an email. I hope they add these sorts of features to the site and more screens as right now I have no reason to revisit. They are missing a trick here but overall a really wonderful experience and one that is so subtle to selling product that I enjoyed the ‘product’ more.
Le Corbusier (1887-1965), widely acclaimed as the most influential architect of the 20th century, was also a celebrated thinker, writer and artist. His architecture and radical ideas for reinventing modern living, from private villas to large-scale social housing to utopian urban plans, still resonate today.
Le Corbusier — The Art of Architecture is the first major survey in London of the internationally renowned architect in more than 20 years. This timely reassessment presents a wealth of original models, interior settings, drawings, furniture, photographs, films, tapestries, paintings, sculpture and books by designed and written by the architect himself.
The exhibition charts how Le Corbusier’s work changed dramatically over the years from the regional vernacular of his early houses in Switzerland, to his iconic Purist villas and interiors of the 1920s, to the dynamic synthesis achieved between his art and architecture as exemplified by his chapel at Ronchamp (1950-55), and his civic buildings in Chandigarh, India (1952-64). Important works by his collaborators, such as Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé are also featured.
Le Corbusier at the Barbican
Barbican celebrates Le Corbusier with a host of special events, including concerts, films and talks by acclaimed speakers. The last truly utopian urban planning project in London and greatly inspired by his aesthetic, Barbican presents the perfect backdrop to explore the man and his legacy.
Thursday Lates
The Gallery is open every Thursday until 10pm. Meet friends at the Gallery cocktail bar and join architects, designers and others for their personal take on the exhibition.
