This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Artist Christian Marclay says that Apple contacted him about using his short film Telephones for their iPhone commercial. He refused and they went ahead and made the commercial using the same idea with different footage. Says Marclay, “the way they dealt with the whole thing is pretty sleazy”. TouchExplode gets credit for spotting the reference. (via df)
Museumr lets you insert one of your Flickr photos into a museum (sort of). I gave my beer bottle-shaped sausage photo the Museumr treatment. (thx, chuck)
50 50 is a compilation of 50 videos of people singing 50 Cent songs.
(via your daily awesome)
Beatboxing flautist + Super Mario theme song = YouTube gold.
Ikea Hacker is a site that highlights using Ikea furniture and products in creative ways.
Pairing San Francisco neighborhoods with New York neighborhoods. For instance, North Beach —> Little Italy, Hayes Valley —> Chelsea, and Mission —> Wiliamsburg.
Nasty Nets used CSS positioning to “embed” one YouTube video into another. “Be sure to hit ‘play’ on both YouTubes.” Reminds me of the animated GIF mashups (more).
A pair of trend maps for 2007, both based on subway maps. The top one depicts the top online companies/brands & how they’re connected while the bottom one deals with ideas (with the River of Consciousness standing in for the Thames).
Both maps were found in this article about internet predictions in 2007. I don’t know about you, but I find these types of maps fun to look at, but completely inscrutable informationally speaking. Surely there’s a more enlightening way to present this information than in Tube map form.
Over the holidays, Mike Monteiro discovered there was a Nacho Libre game for the Nintendo DS. Thinking that an arbitrary choice for a movie tie-in game, he started the DS Tie-In Games I Wanna Play group on Flickr to showcase other possible odd media tie-ins for the DS. Some of my favorite submissions so far include: The Passion of the Christ, Birth of a Nation, Empire, Remains of the Day, My Dinner with Andre (Bon Mot controller sold separately), Super Mario Bros, Learning GNU Emacs, Requiem for a Dream, The Cremaster Cycle, and Getting Things Done.
Here’s a couple of ones that I’ve done: Dancer in the Dark and The New Yorker Draw Your Own Cover Electronic Entertainment (with noncompulsory coöperative mode), pictured below.
If you join the group, there’s a Photoshop kit you can download to join in the fun.
The WSJ has some background on Lasse Gjertsen’s excellent Amateur video.
It’s fun Fotoshop Friday! (Phun Photoshop Phriday?) Anyway, here’s a bunch of pictures of celebrities Photoshopped to look like Star Wars characters. I’m surprised there weren’t more celebrities frozen in carbonite. (via fandumb)
Human beatbox Lasse Gjertsen has taken his skills to the next level. His new video, Amateur, is a clever bit of video sampling: Gjertsen builds an entire song out of tiny video soundbytes of him playing the drums and piano. It’s hard to explain, just watch the damn thing. Cameron says the video “feels like what DJ Shadow would produce if he made videos”.
Trailer for Office Space reimagined as a thriller. (via cyn-c)
Grand Theft Mario = Super Mario Bros + Grand Theft Auto.
Photographs of postcards and miniature souvenirs held in place of actual landmarks and tourist attractions. (via gulfstream)
Turtle with a wheel! A turtle with one missing back leg has been fitted with a wheel to help get around…a turtle/RC car mashup.
77 Million Paintings, a generative artwork by Brian Eno. “Work that continues to create itself in your absence.”
Onstage at PopTech just now, Brian Eno said that a musical piece by Steven Reich had a huge influence on how he thought about art. He said that Reich’s piece showed him that:
1. You don’t need much.
2. The composer’s role is to set up a system and then let it go.
3. The true composer is actually in the listener’s brain.
I’d never heard of Reich, but the name sounded familiar when Eno mentioned it. I realized I’d seen it yesterday when reading about Cory Arcangel’s show at Team Gallery in reference to his piece, Sweet 16:
Cory applied American avant-garde composer Steven Reich’s concept of phasing to the guitar intro of Guns and Roses’ track Sweet Child O’Mine. Rather than use instruments, Cory took the same two clips from the song’s music video and shortened one clip by a single note. As the videos loop, the two intros grow farther apart until they are back in sync.
He’s veered away from video games, but Cory’s new work is looking really interesting these days.
Ben Folds cover of Such Great Heights by The Postal Service using found percussion instruments (like a champagne glass and a plastic mail bin). (thx, james)
This is old news, but I missed it while I was gone, so apologies if you’ve seen this. Banksy replaced copies of Paris Hilton’s new CD in stores around the UK with his own copies containing doctored album art and a 40-minute song by Gnarls Barkley’s Danger Mouse. Banksy made a video of himself pulling off the stunt. Copies of the CD are on eBay for $180-1,300. An mp3 of the song contained on the doctored CD is available.
Here’s a great video of old school arcade games represented using household items…here’s a Frogger screenshot. The rest of the photos and videos are worth a look as well; Roof Sex is reminiscent of Furniture Porn (nsfw). (via waxy)
Pictures of celebrities photoshopped to look like senior citizens. Some of them are amazing.
Here’s a video of Snoop Dogg listening to and singing along with a country-style cover of Gin and Juice by The Gourds.
If you’re reading kottke.org at work and shouldn’t be, you might want to read the site as if it looked like Microsoft Word. Make other sites Work Friendly here.
Richard Donner is re-editing Superman II for a November 2006 DVD release. “Unlike many ‘special edition’ and ‘director’s cut’ movies released over the years, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut will essentially be a completely new film.” (thx, dj)
Stop-motion human Space Invaders. The must-see video game and stop-motion video related link of the day. (thx, janelle)
Update: This looks like the official site.
Photographic recreation of George Seraut’s painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (see it larger). Seurat is one of my favorite painters, and it was a treat to see this painting in Chicago recently.
Great Russian illustrations of movies. I like the Star Wars one and The Terminator.
Socials & More