Tag: video

Nate Harrison's audiovisual essays

A while ago I came across a widely-seen Youtube video about the history of the Amen breakbeat, which was a reposting of a recording of a 2004 documentary audio installation by artist Nate Harrison. It details the artist's view of the rise of the break, as well as what this might tell us about the effects of intellectual property on cultural development.

Can I Get An Amen? — Nate Harrison (2004)

Having enjoyed the piece's dry-yet-engaging style, as well as learning about such a specific cultural phenomenon in some detail, I sought out other pieces by the same artist. Luckily, they're posted on his online gallery, as well as on Archive.org. Several of them are somewhat-abstract video installations which are less interesting to me, but there are several other audiovisual essays which I have enjoyed, on various aspects on art, media and tools.

Continue reading Nate Harrison's audiovisual essays

Vi Hart is probably the best

Vi Hart (who you may recall, I think is amazing) originally became known (to me) by her "doodling in math class" series of short films.

These started as innocuous doodles which accidentally ended up showing the beauty and fascination in mathematics, but eventually became more elaborate and specific.

Things like this:

In this series she describes hexaflexagons. Watch 'em.

Die Floppy Orgel

I love people making weird instruments out of weird things. Here’s an organ made out of a matrix of mechanical floppy drives.

You can read more about it on Ars Technica.

Life in Life

Conway's Game of Life is a well-known cellular automaton in which, every tick, the state of each of the cells on a giant grid is determined only by the states of its immediate neighbours in the previous tick. Despite its extremely simple definition, it is famously Turing-complete, which is roughly to say that it can compute any computable function.

And so, of course, someone has written a Life emulator, in Life.

Perhaps it's Life all the way down...

Robert Yang: Let's Play Anomalous Materials from Half-Life

Robert Yang (who I've mentioned here before) made such a good let's play of the first room and corridor of Half-Life.

A "let's play" is traditionally a narrated video of one or more people playing through a video game. Usually they are just to document the video game so that it can be experienced or understood without playing it, but some of the best ones are made by people who know the game inside out and are able to add some amount of context or commentary to the play-through, drawing the viewer's attention to specific details and not getting side-tracked by any difficulty in progression. There are many great let's plays on the Let's Play Archive.

Robert Yang's video is not really about the game as it is played, but about the design of the game from the perspective of a level designer. It was made for a let's play event.

I don't think he has plans to do more but I would listen to that guy talk about level design any time. A couple of the comments under his post of the video are worth reading too.

Curiosity

Oh this? Just a film of landing on Mars.

PS. If you haven't seen NASA's "Seven Minutes of Terror" video, it's worth checking out. Those folks are crazy.