November 8, 2010
Jason Eppink's The Shadow Machine
The Shadow Machine from Jason Eppink on Vimeo.
"The Shadow Machine is a hand-made analog projection system that reanimates two blacksmiths from the late 1800’s, photographed by Eadweard Muybridge and compiled on plate #374 of his Animal Locomotion series.
The Shadow Machine was conceived of and created for the The Underbelly Project, an extraordinary, unauthorized exhibition of more than one hundred international street artists in an abandoned subway station in New York City. The Shadow Machine’s projected, ghostly figures hammer away in complete darkness at the far end of the platform, ever-toiling spirits working on a never-finished station that was abandoned generations ago.
Inside the Machine, six frames hand-painted on clear plexiglass operate as gobos when lit from behind by narrow beam LEDs. A light sequence, controlled by an Arduino board with custom software using a 9V battery, casts each successive shadow in a loop."... Jason Eppink
Posted by marc at 6:53 AM in Video |
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November 1, 2010
Shit We're Diggin: Chadwick and Spector's "Museum Anatomy"
SInce 1994, Laura Spector and Chadwick Gray have been working on "Museum Anatomy" in which they recreate paintings from Museum Storage facilities onto the body and then document the painting through photography.
Yesterday, many of the world's endangered languages, from the remotest corners of the globe, found a new home--online. Two linguists from the Living Tongues Institute, K. David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, have joined forces with Google to, in the words of Google's blog, "allow small and endangered languages that may have never been heard outside of a remote village to reach a global audience." Clips of the languages find their new home in the National Geographic Enduring Voices channel on YouTube.
It's been estimated that half of the world's languages are likely to disappear in the next century. The new channel may or may not revitalize some of them, but it will at least preserve them in surprising ways. Here, for instance, you can learn how to count from 1 to 37 in the Foe language of Papua New Guinea, with the help of body parts.
Or here, you can listen to a hip-hop song in the Aka language of India.
It's a great partnership for Google. Harrison and Anderson are linguistic rockstars, if there can be said to be such a thing. They were the subjects of the 2008 documentary The Linguists, which chronicled their quest to save languages in far-flung corners of the globe, from the Andes to India to Siberia, and Harrison (top image) just published a book called The Last Speakers, his own take on his field-linguistic activism.
[Image: Flickr user Pop!Tech]
Just days after Sony announced that the cassette Walkman is history, another all time icon of the audio world has been put out to pasture. After months of rumors and speculation, Panasonic officially announced the end of Technics SL-1200 production in a statement to the Tokyo Reporter.
Coincidentally, both the original Sony Walkman and the Technics SL-1200 MkII hit store shelves in 1979, but while the Walkman evolved and changed repeatedly, the SL-1200 MkII you could buy until today was virtually identical to the 1979 model.
Technics first made an SL-1200 in 1972, but it was 1979's MkII version that really caught the imagination of DJs, coinciding with the birth of hip hop and scratching. The sturdy 1200 was just about the only turntable rugged enough to withstand the abuse DJs would throw at it, and it soon became the only turntable any serious DJ would consider.
In the 31 years that followed, Technics introduced several subtle refinements of the original recipe, but is was the basic MkII that remained the most popular. A Panasonic representative was reluctant to put a number on it when I asked a few months ago, but rumors are that over 3 million SL-1200s have been built.
Some claim that the 1200 is being killed off because the tooling is starting to wear out, and the bean counters say that a new set would not be economically practical. In light of the numbers, that makes sense, especially when you consider that 1200 sales are now only around 5% of where they stood just 10 years ago.
As more and more DJs switch to using CDs, or even (gulp) iPods to play their music, those still spinning vinyl will be looking at brands like Stanton and Numark, or snapping up the few 1200s that remain in the various sales channels.
Tokyo Reporter, via Gizmodo
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Catholic school just got a lot scarier.This t-shirt is currently up for voting on Jinx. If you would like to see it go to print, make sure and vote it up.
(Jinx via Gamefreaks)
Monument to Enemas.
Source englishrussia.com Click to Enlarge -->
Unveiled in June 2008 to worldwide attention, the Russian spa Mashuk Aqua-Therm is home to the only monument commemorating enemas in the world. The 770-pound bronze statue stands nearly five feet tall and was created by a local regional artist named Svetlana Avakova.
Drawing inspiration from a Botticelli painting entitled "Venus and Mars," which shows cherubs stealing the God of War's weapon, the artist fashioned a large bronze bulb held aloft by three cherubs as the motif for the spa.
The choice to commemorate such an unusual medical procedure stems from the region in which the spa lies. Known for the many mineral springs in the area, spas such as Mashuk have long been a destination for Russians seeking rest and cures for various ailments in the healing waters.
