The Man in the Black Coat

If this is not a brilliant example of visual poetry, what will ever be?

“Yellow Star” a poem by Kate Ruse
Music: “Interval One” from “The Quiet Lamb” by Her Name is Calla, 2010
Spoken by Kate Ruse

via Society 6

See also:

• Poetry after the beep
• Art above time
• Beauty in motion
• In literature / hidden haikus I have found / unexpectedly

Peanuts: the existentialist edition

Whoever is behind 3eanuts had a brilliant idea. First came the observation: “Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters’ expense”. Then the execution: just omit the last panel of the comic strip and sink in a bleak, black and white world, filled with…

…desperation…

…loneliness…

…doubt…

A true existentialist masterpiece.

See also:

• The drugs of Alice in Wonderland
• Being (in a) John Malkovich (nightmare)
• The Wire, the Victorian novel

Poetry after the beep

We talked about the meme and the meme  meme, time to hear now the first ever poetry meme, as, at least, described by the Goudal site, where they asked people to read their favorite short poems into their answering machine for a project entitled Verse By Voice.

Listen to  Zadie Smith (White Teeth, On Beauty) reading Frank O’Hara’s Animals here.

Words without words

Which one is stronger? A word or an image?

In Words without words, a visual dictionary of words with abstract, complex or underused meanings, these two are beautifully combined by illustrator, designer and new media artist, Veronika Heckova.

More definitions after the jump

For the love of fonts

As typophiles, we love everything that has to do with fonts and modern typography.  And we just loved the floating version of the Akzidenz Grotesk typeface.

Playing with motion and typography, Cameron Zotter and Jinhwan Kim have created ‘elliptical forms’ of all the letters of the alphabet. By moving an iPod Touch in six rows and using long exposure photography, they have captured a floating image of each letter in a series of videos, which you can download, as the font itself.

Check out the process.

See the whole alphabet of the Akzidenz Grotesk typeface after the jump.

Shiro to Kuro means Black and White

With tumblr-like, curator websites being the fad in the internet at the moment, you see a lot of content and concept recycling out there. But once in a while you come across something either truly original, or truly beautiful. Shirotokuro lies in the latter category. In its own words it is “a curated gallery of exquisite design, illustration and photography distilled to it’s purest monochromatic elements of black and white”. It sure is.

See also:

• The neatness effect
• What app do you wish for?
• The lyrics on the wall

Movie color barcode

Each movie leaves you with a feeling, and this feeling is quite often translated to a specific color. For example, Matrix will always be green, whereas Slumdog Millionaire has more brownish nuances.

How would you feel if you could see the entire color pallet of a movie in just one image? MovieBarCode visualizes all the different colors used in a movie by compressing every single frame of an entire movie into just one signature and colorful barcode.

The Matrix

The Social Network

Pretty amazing. Don’t you think? See more after the jump

Water sculptures

Is water shapeless? Or does it take all possible forms? In his mesmerizing video, Shinichi Maruyama from Nagano, Japan captures the countless shapes that water can take. In slow motion.

It is not the first time that Shinichi Maruyama plays with water. In his past series of photographs, titled Kusho, which means ‘writing in the sky’, he has blended black ink into water and has photographed this ‘encounter’ in order to capture in space and time the creative intersections of these two different media before they merge into one.

In literature / hidden haikus I have found / unexpectedly

Haiku finder is a simple yet impressive little web app that discovers hidden haiku patterns in any text you paste into its search box. I discovered it on BuzzFeed and I was soon copy-pasting a great part of Project Gutenberg on that clever little page. Here are some of my finds (granted, most of them are translations in english, but still):

Kafka’s Metamorphosis:

“Gregor!” shouted his
sister, glowering at him
and shaking her fist.

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment:

Something was happening
to him entirely new,
sudden and unknown

Checkov’s Uncle Vanya:

I can still feel his
voice vibrating in the air;
it caresses me.

Shakespeare’s Alls Well That Ends Well:

The web of our life
is of a mingled yarn, good
and ill together.

Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:

If your feelings are
still what they were last April,
tell me so at once

Dickens’ Great Expectations:

“You ridiculous
boy,” said Estella, “will you
never take warning?”

cummings’ The Enormous Room:

It was a fine place,
a large city to be sure.
But always changing.

What’s impressive is how well these little haikus really summarize the whole essence of the works they were inconspicuously hiding in. What else is impressive is how haikus seem inherent in the rhythm of some authors’ writing: Austen and e.e.cummings yield up large numbers of haikus. Other authors have scarce or no haikus at all.

I’ll now go and search for haikus in the new iTunes terms and conditions.

Real birds’ tweets on twitter

I suffer from another case of falling in love with an idea online. Birds on Twitter is an amazing project by Latvian weekly magazine “Ir”. Their idea is to, simply, post tweets on Twitter. I mean actual bird tweets.

They have installed a simple keyboard outside a small village on the west coast of Latvia and put large chunks of fat on top of the keys. As the local birds use their pecks to eat, they type messages that are streamed on the site’s twitter account: @hungry_birds.

There is also a live web cam, but it was, unfortunately, down when I was checking it, earlier.

What do the birds say? Here’s a sample: “nnnnnnnnnnnjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjujunnujjjkmumnmmnmmn;;;;;pppppppppppppppppppppppppppplplpp”. It’s not that bad – still, you could always join us on twitter for some slightly more eloquent tweets: @itsasmallweb.

See also:

• Invisible cities
• The art of visual storytelling
• I can see my house from here

Hours as colors

This is one of the coolest ideas ever: The colour clock is an online clock and a downloadable screen saver (for Mac users only) that represents time as a hexadecimal color.

Let me explain. Do you know your RGBs?

Standing for Red Green Blue, RGB is the color model that combines these three colors to create all the rest. In the web, all colors are represented in hexadecimal RGB codes, ie sets of three numbers (value of red, value of green, value of blue). What else is represented as a set of three numbers? Time (value of hours, value of minutes, value of seconds). What if we combined the two codes? Quite obvious now that I mention it, but quite ingenious for the person who thought of it first. Respect.

This clock is magnificent both conceptually and aesthetically. Perfection.

See also:

• Time put to words
• Exploring colors

Don’t stuff yourself on this one

The web might be small but it’s a wondrous place. Filled with exciting things. We blog about them daily. But once in a while you find something that, for some strange reason, completely fascinates you to such degree that you keep thinking “why haven’t I discovered this earlier?”

That’s the case for me with they draw and cook, a little gem of a food blog. The idea is simple: each post is a recipe, but the recipe is illustrated by an artist or designer. Some minimal, some whimsical, some literal, some abstract, every single recipe is a delight. So much so, that I had great difficulty choosing a single one. So here come a lot of recipes:

Manhattan as a pinball machine

Invisible cities

“Love is dead in metropolis/All contact through glove or partition/What a waste/The City/A wasting disease”

What if the city is no longer a wasting disease, but a place of network activity and sharing?  A new kind of city – a city of mind?

Invisible cities is an online interactive project, which “displays geocoded activity from online services such as Twitter and Flickr, both in real-time and in aggregate. Real-time activity is represented as individual nodes that appear whenever a message or image is posted. Aggregate activity is reflected in the underlying terrain: over time, the landscape warps as data is accrued, creating hills and valleys representing areas with high and low densities of data”, according to their creators Christian Marc Schmidt and Liangjie Xia.

Let’s re-experience our physical environment.

via Brainpickings

Urban file sharing

Imagine that, instead of visiting virtual places like Dropbox to share files, you visited real places: a street, a bus stop, a bridge. Where you would find a mysterious USB peaking through the wall. And you could download its files, or upload your own. For anyone to find. True, unconditional (file) sharing.

This is the idea behind Dead Drops a public intervention project by Berlin based artist Aram Bartholl. In  his words “Dead Drops is an anonymous, offline, peer-to-peer file-sharing network in public space”. There is even a Dead Drops manifesto. He launched the original Dead Drop in New York in 2010, but there have been more around the world since. Check this list to see if there is a Dead Drop happening now near you.

And what’s best, Dead Drop is open. Anyone can start one. Here are the instructions.

near you

What do you appreciate the most?

Perhaps it’s time to start appreciating the small pleasures of life or, shall I say, the ephemeral: the first snow in winter, drinking coffee early in the morning, rubber boots and a rainy day. And writing them down. AppreciateIt is an online project, created by Faust, an visual communication firm, where you can read hundred “notes of appreciation” and submit your own. And if you need inspiration, check these thank you notes.

“Dear boarding passes, thanks for making such fine book marks…

I love finding you between the pages, years later, when I pull something off the self. Much love, Leah”

Leah Dieterich’s mother always told her to write thank you notes. So she does. To everything. Everyday.  Little thank you notes on post it notes, that she posts on her blog: thxthxthx.

Celebrating everyday trivialities, these thank you notes scratch the surface of our realities and reveal a microcosmos of emotions and nuances.

See more brilliant thank you notes after the jump

Enter the world of Carolina Melis

Colorful, imaginative and tender. It’s the world of visual artist Carolina Melis.

This is her latest animation, for What a Big Wide World by Essie Jain:

See a selection of her most impressive videos after the jump.

I love Cash

When I hear that trumpet sound/I’m gonna rise out of the ground.

I do not know if we are going to meet Johnny Cash down the river road, but we sure are going to meet all of his fans. Cash’s final studio recording “Ain’t No Grave“ is being revived in the Johnny Cash project.

The Johnny Cash project is a post-mortem tribute to the Man In Black, an online, interactive project, where participants from all over the web can create their unique and personal portraits of Johnny, using a custom drawing tool, in a single template. All these different drawings, compiled by director Chris Milk, responsible also for the mind-blowing  Wilderness Downtown, are integrated in a collective music video. Actually not only one video but different, ever-changing, randomly generated videos.

Each drawing constitutes a different frame of the music video, and all of them are combined in different versions of the song. Thus, you can choose to see, among others, the most-brushstrokes-per-frame version, or the one with-the-most-realistic frames.

See more after the jump.

The strings of the NYC subway

Imagine that every subway line is a chord and that every time trains on two intersecting lines cross, that chord emits a note. Picture this in real-time, as trains go back and forth. This is the music the strings of the NYC subway play:

The above video is a video capture of the actual interactive application, Conductor, based on real-time MTA info. Created by Alexander Chen, the visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.

A true example of web poetry.

via kottke