Cue Tonight at the Blue Theater

I'll be doing a little projector work tonight as Cue plays at the Blue Theater, 10pm.

BOINC

BOINC is an open infrastructure for distributed computing based off the engine that originally drove the SETI@home project (a program that used people's spare computer cycles to analyze massive amounts of radio telescope data needed to look for evidence of extraterrestrial life, all in the form of a screensaver). This allows you to use your computer to help with some big computational jobs when you're not using it. (plus the screensavers are cool and... purposeful looking)

BOINC is a software platform for volunteer computing. BOINC lets you donate computing power to scientific research projects such as:

Predictor@home: investigate protein-related diseases.
Climateprediction.net, BBC Climate Change Experiment, and Seasonal Attribution Project: study climate change.
World Community Grid: advance our knowledge of human disease.
LHC@home: improve the design of the CERN LHC particle accelerator
Quantum Monte Carlo at Home: study the structure and reactivity of molecules using Quantum Chemistry.
SZTAKI Desktop Grid: search for generalized binary number systems.
Einstein@home: search for gravitational signals emitted by pulsars.
Rosetta@home: help researchers develop cures for human diseases.
SIMAP: calculate protein similarity data for use by many biological research projects.
SETI@home: Look for radio evidence of extraterrestrial life.
You can participate in more than one project, and you control how much of your computing power goes to each project. If you participate in several projects, your computer will be kept busy even when one project has no work.

Link

Boing Boing: Jenny Hart's roller derby embroidery patterns

My friend Jenny just got BoingBoinged!

Impressions of the Deep

I just had a chance to see the incredible nature film Impressionen unter Wasser ("Impressions of the deep"), the last picture shot by blacklisted German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Impressions... took Riefenstahl a decade to film, and had her scuba diving well into her 90's (evidently she lied about her age to receive scuba lessons). Sadly, this movie is on a US do-not-distribute list and is unavailable in a big chunk of the world (the copy I saw was from Singapore). There's some mind-blowing fauna being shot here- fluorescing in retina-searing colors under full-spectrum light, biological shapes echoed nowhere on land. The film is blissfully free of dialogue and scripting, and we're left to revel in nature in all it's astounding, psychedelic complexity. The footage is, however, accompanied by some unfortunately yani-esque music by none other than Giorgio Moroder (although my suspicion is that very little of the score is Moroder's, the credits list another name along with his, and a lot of the music is really bad.)
With the advent of bittorrent and low-res video sharing sites like You Tube, my hope is that strange, shunned, video gems like this will finally get to reach their audiences. I'm envisioning a vast media archive where stuff like this has its place right next to whatever cookie cutter nature docs we are used to seeing. Here's to hoping.

YouTube - Leguman contre Strator

Leguman! from Roland Topor's kids show Telechat.

pink

Photographer turned filmmaker Charlie White has released another short video, this one is not explicitly a music video, like his piece for Interpol, but it follows a music video format. It is, of course, thoroughly creepy and great. Like a copy of seventeen magazine where all the advertisements for cosmetics and shampoos and feminine hygiene goos come pouring out into a pepto-bismol-colored psychedelic mess of commodified, sexualized, teenage gyno-terror. Freaky and awesome.
Link
Found Via boingboing

Fuzzy Town

Fuzzy Town is a collaborative project of Bob Sabiston's and David and Nathan Zellner that I'm involved with. David has a completed script and has worked with Bob and a handful of animators to make a quick trailer to show off a little of the world he has imagined.

Link, 38MB, Quicktime 7 required, ipod compatible
(note: if your browser loads m4v files as a bunch of text, just right-click or control-click on the link and select "save as". You can open the downloaded file in the QuickTime player or in iTunes)

For more information go to FortHQ.com

Monster Road on DVD

Monster Road, the wonderful documentary about animator Bruce Bickford, has just been released on DVD. The disc has about a half an hour of extras, including some deleted scenes that, while they probably didn't fit in with the style of the finished picture, are really worth watching. There's also some animation samples that haven't been released before, even on The Incredible Mister Bickford. I can't recommend this doc highly enough, it's a moving and subtle study of what it means to be an artist, a human being, and a survivor of a family that has fallen apart.
Link

The Octopus Project @ Wall of Sound

The Octopus Project @ Wall of Sound, originally uploaded by phlezk.

Octopus Project at the Wall of Sound photoset by Phlezk

Kleptones sample Waking Life

Dan Shuta writes:

Not sure if you've heard the newest kleptones mash-up album, 24 hours, but they've got a little sample of your scene with linklater in waking life: "i'm starting to think that i'm dead...". end of disc2/track9

Music is Happiness!

Nick Smith has finished his video for The Octopus Project's song Music is Happiness (which I also worked on a little).

Here's an ipod compatible QuickTime movie of it!

(22mb, QuickTime 7 required)

Handful Savants

Here's a little of the projection footage I'm working on for Cue.
It's rough- you can't get too worried about syncing edits up to beats in the song, because they won't hit them when you play it live, and you can't get too into making it like a music video because you have to fill up a whole set with stuff. Right now I play the visuals off a dvd and chapter forward for each song. In the future I'll be playing clips with a midi keyboard and vj software like Union. I need to save up and get a MacBook Pro and my own projector though before I start messing with that.
Handful Savants (quicktime 7 required, 33 mb)

Zellner Bros. and John Bryant at the Blue Theater in Austin

Monday, April 10 @ the Blue Theater
Happy Hour at 6:00pm, Screenings at 7:00pm
Link

GreenCine Daily: Caveh, Comcast and Cuban.

Far be it from me to post the obvious on here, but there's a pretty unprecidented dialogue going on between Caveh Zahedi, Mark Cuban and Jonathan Marlow in the Comments section of GreenCine Daily and on Caveh's Blog. The issue at hand is Cuban's refusal to play Caveh's film I am a Sex Addict in Landmark Theaters as part of some corporate maneuvering against Comcast. It's interesting to see these people's names suddenly pop up in the comments of a blog I read every day.

Austinist: Best of QT Fest Lineup Revealed

Link

Apple - Trailers - Art School Confidential

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terminus1525.ca - The Game Show

The Game Show brings together 17 emerging and established Canadian artists for a month-long, online collaboration. The fruits of their collaborative projects appear in this exhibition in two parts. In Part 1, the artists describe drawing games they have played in the company of friends. Follow each artist's "recipe" and see the intriguing and amusing outcomes of the games they play. In Part 2 of The Game Show, I have chosen four of the games from Part 1 and then acted as games-master, coordinating all round-robin collaborations between the artists, most of whom were strangers to one another. All of the games have been adapted for play through e-mail correspondence, but are normally played in a group around a table.

Link
Thanks Calem!

Interesting accidents

I was absent-mindedly playing around with some stock footage that I'm using for visuals for the band Cue, and while trying to show someone how to export individual audio tracks from Final Cut Pro, I drug a couple of unrelated Logic Pro tracks in there and made a big mess. I exported a movie from the sequence and it's kind of interesting.

Honk, tweet, fart

Making noise with Steve Brudniak.


steve brudniak