The Chinese Room

Well this thought experiment is very close to my heart.

Do you believe that Artificial Intelligence is possible? I mean not now, but theoretically in the future? Do you think that we can build a machine so intelligent that it can be considered to think as a human? I do. But John Searle does not. And here is why – and it’s only 60 sec long:

from the Open University

DNA animated

DNA explained in a visually appealing way.

Created by Territory Studio and creative director David Sheldon-Hicks & art director William Samuel for BBC Knowledge & Learning Explainer series.

See also:

• (notes on) biology
• The DNA of a city
• How big is our universe?

A match made in androgynous heaven

Tilda Swinton and David Bowie play a middle-aged, middle-class couple (with a twist, of course) in his new video for his song The Stars (Are Out Tonight).  Enjoy!

Enjoy music

Even if we do not have to understand music, we surely enjoy it. And we did enjoy this magnificent video animation about the process of learning music by finally., a creative and passionate studio was from Germany.

See also:

• Visualising sound
•  What Does Music Look Like?
• Painting with notes

I will not make any more boring art

A portrait of the godfather of conceptual art, John Baldessari. A brilliant video for its inspiration, editing, graphic design and, of course, for its narration by Tom Waits.

See also:

• The quest of an artist
• Kubrick’s animated odyssey
• Ceci n’est pas une post

In every cry of every Man

A few days before the opening ceremony of the 30th Olympic Games in London, Alex Robinson remembers William Blake and his poem London, published in Songs of Experience in 1794, to portray Olympic city’s face.

See also:

• The sky turned blood red
• There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
• The Man in the Black Coat

The domin-ation of the Starry Night

Impressed. I can’t really find any other word to describe my impression when I first saw Flippy Cat’s amazing video of Starry Night by Vincent van DominoGogh. Van Gogh’s famous painting was recreated by 7067 dominoes in an attempt which took more than 11 hours to be completed.

Super cool or what…

See also:

• Guernica comes to life
• Ceci n’est pas une post
• Wireless dominoes
• The sky turned blood red

Tim Burton’s animated filmography

He did it again. French animator and graphic designer Martin Woutisseth, whose animation on Stanley Kubrick’s filmography we have already admired, created an animated video for Tim Burton’s films, this time. What can we say? We love Stanley Kubrick, we love Tim Burton and now we love Martin Woutisseth.

See also:

• Kubrick’s animated odyssey
• Tarantino from below and Anderson from above
• The ABCs of cinema

The Old Man and the Sea: watch it

Instead of reading Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea, you can now watch it in a beautiful hand drawn stop-motion animation by German photographer and designer Marcel Schindler.

via Brainpickings

See also:

• The sky turned blood red
• Guernica comes to life
• There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out

Tarantino from below and Anderson from above

Filming from below and filming from above. Two different techniques, two different approaches, both contributing to the film’s essence.

Kogognada has created two short fascinating videos; the first one is a compilation of Quentin Tarantino’s shots filmed from below.

And the second one is compilation of Wes Anderson’s overhead shots of hands doing all sort of things.

Pretty cool. Don’t you think?

via Laughing Squid

See also:

• The ABCs of cinema
• Kubrick’s animated odyssey
• Cut. The last image

The ABCs of cinema

A video quiz this time to test our movie knowledge. Evan Seitz created an amazing animation video, where its letter of the alphabet represents a popular film. How many titles can you name?

See also:

• First quiz of the year
• Last quiz of the year
• See the object, guess the movie

A definition of love

Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It’s just a little while, and then it burns away… Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

A definition of love by Charles Bukowski.

via Brain Pickings

See also:

• Poetry after the beep
• In their own words
• The Man in the Black Coat
• Lolita butterflies

The sky turned blood red

“I was walking along a path with two friends / the sun was setting / suddenly the sky turned blood red / I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence / there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city / my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety / and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”
Edvard Munch, 1893

Not only poems can be animated, as we have seen in our previous post, but paintings as well. Edvard Munch’s The Scream gets a life of its own in this amazing video, created by animation director and graphic artist Sebastian Cosor.

See also:

• There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
• Guernica comes to life
• Ceci n’est pas une post

There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out

To visualise a poem’s world : what a challenge.

Designer Monika Umba attempts a magical immersion to Bukowski’s world with her mesmerizing animation video of Charles Bukowski’s poem “The Bluebird,” originally published in his 1992 anthology.

The Bluebird

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?

via Brainpickings

See also:

• The Man in the Black Coat
• Things deteriorate
• Art above time

Our digital identity

How many pieces of our personal data are collected everyday by networks?

Michael Rigley creates an amazing motion video tracing the information we feed into the network everyday .

via Quipsologies

See also:

• In 60 seconds
• The universe of social networks
• The internet in 2015
• It started with the occasional profile update and now you are hooked: social media addiction

Creating a mini universe

In 2010, scientists succeeded in recreating a miniature version of the Big Bang. Within a few years, some of the universe’s deepest secrets may be unlocked.

In Genesis,  a 3D short film, Andreas Wannerstedt is taking the change to create a miniature universe and become a mini God.

See also:

• Science songs
• How big is our universe?
• Science distilled in a phrase
• Antikythera mechanism explained by LEGO

Dot by dot

A portrait made entirely of dots. Following the great tradition of pointillism of Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and other notable painters, Miguel Endara created Hero, a portrait of his father, using 3.2 million dots.

Watch the amazing making-of video.

via Laughing Squid

See also:

• Made of crayons
• Ceci n’est pas une post
• The quest of an artist
• The Man in the Black Coat

A life in film and design

In just a title, you have to capture the essence and give identity to a brand, a cover, a film. That’s why we can comprehend some of designers’ ‘peculiarities’ and that is the reason we love Saul Bass and his work: he managed to convey through graphic design the atmosphere of some of the greatest films of Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese.

His work is put together in a book, entitled Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design, designed by his daughter Jennifer Bass and written by distinguished design historian Pat Kirkham. The large tome covers more than 1,400 illustrations, covering classic films such as Anatomy of a Murder and Vertigo and many others never published before. To celebrate the release of the book, Ian Albinson created the following video, which highlights some of Bass’ most celebrated films.

via Visual News

See also:

• A brief history of title design
• The first ever designed album cover
• Who’s who in a film crew?

Follow @itsasmallweb

Aronofsky does it again

Ellen Burstyn getting chased by a refrigerator is the scariest image in film. By far. Lonely, scared, hallucinating old lady on diet-pill amphetamines.

Daren Arononsfky does it again. This time it’s young people and meth. The result is as eerie and full of despair as we’ve learned to expect from Aronofsky.

The short films are part of an ad campaign by the Meth Project. Tony Kaye, Wally Pfister and Alejandro González Iñárritu have created ads for this campaign. But truth be told, nobody does it as well as Aronofsky.

Follow @itsasmallweb

The game is over

Game over. How many times haven’t we heard this phrase? Some of the most famous old school video games deaths compiled together.

via Kottke

See also:

• A history of videogames
• Arcade characters invade urban landscapes
• The bad guys (in video games)

Follow @itsasmallweb