kottke.org posts about mesmerizing
On January 11, 2000, when he was 19 years old, photographer Noah Kalina took a photo of himself — and just never stopped doing that. Although he’s missed a few days here and there, he’s kept up his daily habit for 20 years. The video above shows all 20 years of his daily photos.
Six years into the project in 2006, Kalina uploaded a video of his progress to Vimeo and then YouTube and it went viral, changing the trajectory of his career and life. The project has exhibited in art galleries around the world and The Simpsons even did a parody of it.
As someone who has done one thing near-daily for 20+ years, I feel a great kinship towards this project. I’ll see you in 2040, Noah.
Update: Kalina did an interview about the project with Van Schneider:
I can basically look at any shot in this project and know exactly where I was. Certain photos provide details and I can recall who I was with or what I was up to. It’s the perfect diary for me since I’ve never really enjoyed writing.
MOCEAN is a mesmerizing short film by cinematographer Chris Bryan of ocean waves crashing and surging in slow motion.
The feeling of jumping off the rocks in the dark by myself just to capture the very first rays of light hitting the ocean without another sole in sight is unexplainable, its one of the most amazing feelings ever, its like my own personal therapy.
Bryan worked as a cinematographer on the BBC’s Blue Planet II. Distracting URL watermark aside, I could have watched footage like this for another hour, especially of waves from underneath the water.
I’ve followed the work of world champion free diver Guillaume Néry for several years now and this video might be his best one yet. In it, he explores a bunch of different waterscapes, floating and diving and walking until you can’t tell which way is up and if he’s actually in water or in outer space.
Also of note is that the video was filmed by free diver Julie Gautier, who shot the entire thing while holding her breath, a more difficult task than Néry’s. I’d like to see the making-of video for that!
Pro tip: remind yourself to breathe while you’re watching this. I found myself unconsciously holding my breath, on and off, almost the entire time. (via swissmiss)
In a Nutshell is a mesmerizing stop motion animation directed by Fabio Friedli that attempts to sum up the entire world in just five minutes, “from a seed to war, from meat to love, from indifference to apocalypse”. This is very very well done. (via waxy)
I barely know how to describe this so maybe you should just watch it. Animator Ismael Sanz-Pena took a single image of a medieval cathedral and used the facade’s repeating elements to find the movement within, kind of like a zoetrope. (Ok, I guess that’s a pretty good description. I still think you should just watch it though.) See also Sanz-Pena’s earlier attempts of the same effect. (via colossal)
Engineer & animator Brett Foxwell and musician & animator Conor Grebel collaborated on this gorgeous stop motion animation of pieces of wood being slowly ground away by a milling machine. Watch as the knots and grain of the wood come alive to mirror teeming cities, spiraling galaxies, flowing water, and dancing alien worlds. Colossal briefly interviewed Foxwell about the video:
“Fascinated with the shapes and textures found in both newly-cut and long-dead pieces of wood, I envisioned a world composed entirely of these forms,” Foxwell told Colossal. “As I began to engage with the material, I conceived a method using a milling machine and an animation camera setup to scan through a wood sample photographically and capture its entire structure. Although a difficult and tedious technique to refine, it yielded gorgeous imagery at once abstract and very real. Between the twisting growth rings, swirling rays, knot holes, termites and rot, I found there is a lot going on inside of wood.”
Some stills from the video are available as prints.
Macro Room, which has previously brought you close-up shots of melting ice cream and pills dissolving in water, recently filled an aquarium with water, shot various colors of ink into it, and filmed the swirling beauty in close-up slow motion.
P.S. It’s worth sitting though the bro-y thanks portion of the video to get a glimpse of their lo-fi rooftop setup. Did they shoot all that on a phone?
French visual effects artist Maxime Causeret took a track from Max Cooper’s album Emergence and created these wonderful biologically inspired patterns and interactions.
Maxime also shows us a section of animated reaction-diffusion patterns, where simple chemical feedback mechanisms can yield complex flowing bands of colour — these forms of system were originally thought up by Alan Turing, and were part of the early seeds of the field of systems biology, which seeks to simulate life with computers, in order to better understand the systems producing the complexity we see in the living world. They were also the starting point of my main research area many years ago before I got lost in music! (where I began with the question of what patterns could be produced via reaction-diffusion forms of system as opposed to gene-regulatory network controlled patterning).
There’s a blue brain coral pattern at the 1:30 mark and a neuron-ish pattern at 2:30 that I wish would go on forever. Headphones recommended, psychoactive drugs optional. (via colossal)
Artist Annette Labedzki has been uploading videos of paint mixing to Instagram and YouTube to great interest. The video above, in which the view is halved and then mirrored, starts off slow but is particularly mesmerizing…I think my brain is addicted to symmetry. Georgia O’Keeffe’s name popped into my brain early on while watching it. (via @colossal)
Meditate in front of your computer for a few minutes with this soothing dreamlike video. (via colossal)
From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, an animated map of the yearly migratory patterns of 118 bird species in the Western Hemisphere.
La Sorte says a key finding of the study is that bird species that head out over the Atlantic Ocean during fall migration to spend winter in the Caribbean and South America follow a clockwise loop and take a path farther inland on their return journey in the spring. Species that follow this broad pattern include Bobolinks, Yellow and Black-billed cuckoos, Connecticut and Cape May warblers, Bicknell’s Thrush, and shorebirds, such as the American Golden Plover.
“These looped pathways help the birds take advantage of conditions in the atmosphere,” explains La Sorte. “Weaker headwinds and a push from the northeast trade winds as they move farther south make the fall journey a bit easier. The birds take this shorter, more direct route despite the dangers of flying over open-ocean.”
The map was created with data from eBird, a database of crowdsourced bird sightings. They also created a follow-up map which labels each of the species. Look at how far Baird’s Sandpiper (#5) flies…all the way from central Argentina to Northern Canada and back. (thx, kevin)
This is a bunch of animated naked people falling into two precise columns. Mesmerizing. Perhaps a little NSFW? And throw some headphones on…the sound, while subtle, is essential.
See also that video — you remember the one — of a bunch of computer-generated people being mowed down by a rotating bar.
If you’re keeping tabs at home, this is the third video I’ve posted to kottke.org featuring self-destructing washing machines. While not quite as good as this one — “it seems as though the washer is attempting to turn into the Picasso version of itself” — there’s a sublime moment where this chaotic neutral washing machine seemingly defies gravity by hanging in the air like Michael Jordan.
You know what’s pretty? Big waves and surfing in slow motion. Take a break and relax at 1000 fps with this mesmerizing video.
The Hans Zimmer soundtrack only adds to the effect. (via ★interesting)
Walking City is a slowly evolving walking video sculpture by Universal Everything. A walking tour of modern architecture, if you will.
File this one under mesmerizing. A deserving winner of the Golden Nica award at Ars Electronica. (via subtraction)
This clever and well-done visualization shows where individual NYC taxis picked up and dropped off their fares over the course of a day.
Mesmerizing. Has anyone done analysis on which drivers are the most effective and what the data shows as the most effective techniques? The best drivers must have their tricks on where to be at which times to get the most fares. (via @dens)
Korean artist group Shinseungback Kimyonghun made a video of every time they clicked their mouse. It’s mesmerizing.
Using an iPad app called Procreate, artist Kyle Lambert made this painting of Morgan Freeman. It took him 200 hours. The video of him doing it is mesmerizing:
(via gizmodo)
This video visualization of 15 different sorting algorithms is mesmerizing. (Don’t forget the sound.)
An explanation of the process. You can play with several different kinds of sorts here.
This video of Atlanta cheerleader Mikayla Clark breaking the world backflip record is mesmerizing. I did not know there was a world backflip record, but here is someone breaking it last year, too.
Yes, it is gymnastics day on kottke.org, what of it?
A nice video from Wired that shows how Tesla’s sedan is made.
Tesla got the factory for a song from Toyota in 2010, spent about a year or so setting up tooling and started producing the Model S sedan in mid-2012. The automaker brings in raw materials by the truckload, including the massive rolls of aluminum that are bent, pressed, and formed to create the car. Those lightweight components are assembled by swarm of red robots in an intricate ballet that is mesmerizing to behold.
(via ★interesting)
Filmed at 780 fps with a Phantom Flex from the back of a moving SUV, James Nares’ Street depicts people walking New York streets in super slow motion.
The film runs 60 minutes (depicting about three minutes of real time footage), Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore did the soundtrack, and it’s on display at The Met until the end of May.
Update: Here’s another short clip of the full film from the National Gallery of Art.
The last Kottke.org post about how hot dogs are made was almost 4 years ago, and that video doesn’t event work anymore and I say Saturday is the day to learn stuff anyway.
Two things about this video:
1) The scene of hot dogs shooting out of the hot dog maker and into the pile of hot dogs is mesmerizing. Virtually every ‘How x is made’ video has a similarly awesome shot.
2) These dudes make almost 2.5 million hot dogs per shift, which… Well, there are far, far, far more hot dogs being made in this country everyday than any of us realize.
(via ★andre)
This is a 1930 short film from avant-garde filmmaker Ralph Steiner that shows dozens of gears and other machinery at work.
(thx, matthew)
You’ve seen one washing machine self-destruction video, you’ve seen them all, right? Maybe not. Back in August, I posted this short video of a washer destroying itself (with some help from a brick) but this longer video is mesmerizing and almost poignant at times.
At times, it seems as though the washer is attempting to turn into the Picasso version of itself, a Cubist sculpture manifesting itself over time. (via @aaroncoleman0)
This is mesmerizing: using Google Image Search and starting with a transparent image, this video cycles through each subsequent related image, over 2900 in all.
(via ★mattb)
Mesmerizing video of a series of pendulums moving in an out of sync with each other until at the end…well, I won’t spoil it.
(thx, john)
Watch as a woman gets chocolate sauce poured all over her face for almost ten minutes.
I don’t know what to think of this one: mesmerizing? yucky? erotic? hunger-inducing? I have a hungry tingling disgust going on here…
Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin “perform” Steve Reich’s Clapping Music. This is mesmerizing.
(via @sippey)
Mesmerizing Zapruder-esque footage that seems to show a woman talking on a mobile phone at the 1928 premiere of a Charlie Chaplin film at Mann’s Chinese Theatre.
According to this guy, the simplest explanation is that the woman is a time traveller. Stick that in your Occam’s razor and shave it! (via geekologie)
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