On the blog this week we met M83’s Anthony Gonzalez, were impressed by a skateboard video shot using a drone, we downloaded FIELD’s Energy Flow app and found out about their Gravity film, and we spoke to the designer of the Zelda-inspired Skrillex Quest. We also posted the third episode in our Kill Screen series, met Quvenzhané Wallis the star of Beasts of The Southern Wild, spoke with Brazilian media artist Raquel Kogan, and explored Scott Snibbe’s new app album for Philip Glass.

And on the webzzzzz…

· Find out what your fav NES game says about you. If it was California Games then “You have given a hamster a mohawk” [via]

· The trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s new film Pacific Rim features giant monsters and giant robots—and Stringer Bell. And, naturally, someone made a Power Rangers spoof out of it.

· A low cost lamp powered by gravity.

·Zeitgeist 2012 (above) looks at the year via our Google searches.

@stewart23rd

Music has historically inspired fashion, whether it’s the studs and chains of punk rock, the now-universal sense of hip-hop style, or the rave-inspired phat pants that we’d rather forget. Berlin-based designer Alba Prat takes a more direct inspiration from music, from one artist in particular.

Creator Carsten Nicolai‘s mathematical music inspired her to create her Syn Chron line. Prat’s deep appreciation for Nicolai’s work reflects in her statements about his compositions. “Known for his aesthetics of precision, his work lies at the intersection of art and science. He unites both fields together in form of sculpture, light, and sound installations creating a minimal, cold and technical atmosphere.”

In the spirit of data visualization, Prat based some of the Syn Chron designs on her own heartbeat. “I have recorded my heartbeat in two different situations and used special software to visualize it in distinctive abstract forms, which are the basis of my prints… The recording for the first print took place in a quiet situation. Through the graphic representation of its spectrogram I created the luminous digital print. For the other, I recorded my heartbeat directly after doing exercise. The transformation of the audio file into bits, the most basic digital data, is used to create the jacquard pattern.”

Her interpretations of Nicolai’s forms come out in understated designs, using basic colors in striking patterns. Perhaps Carsten Nicolai will trade in his chosen black for some of these threads…

Learn more about Carsten Nicolai’s music-making process in the video below…

[via Triangulation]

@ImYourKid

Our Creators are a talented and prolific bunch, and our inbox is always overflowing with alerts of new remixes and mashups from the incredible DJs and producers in our line-up. We just couldn’t keep these fresh new tunes to ourselves because, after all, filesharing is caring. Here are our top picks from the past week. For past Creators Remix Roundups, click here.

A-Trak: “Piss Test” (Jim Jones, Flatbush Zombies, and El-P remix)

The un-appetizingly named “Piss Test” single from Fool’s Gold’s A-Trak has been remodeled by three more acts from the label’s lineup. Jim Jones is probably the most straight-forward, dirty rapper of the set and opens the track on point. Next come those freak-rap pranksters, the Flatbush Zombies. That is arguably my favorite name in hip-hop, and their verse sounds like what Ying Yang twins would sound like if they had real spitting skills and were on LSD. But hold out for El-P on the last verse, bringing some speed and closing up the track with laser-like precision.

Jamie xx: “Reconsider” (Jamie xx remix)

On the theme of incestuous remixing, Jamie xx just released a remix of The xx song “Reconsider.” Jamie starts building up the layers about a minute in, and frequently will cut out the background noise before Romy’s coo comes back in, it’s like the soft-core version of a beat dropping. The whole effect is rather mystical and airy, then the siren-like background effects begin to sound like warped wolf howls.

Symphony Hall: “One Night Stand” (Brodinski remix)

And, as luck would have it, we have one more self-reflexive remix for you. Brodinski has teamed up with Canblaster to remix “One Night Stand,” the single that Canblaster and DJ Riton released together under the Symphony Hall moniker. Since the “Symphony Hall” collaboration was apparently a “one time only” event, we have to make the most of their single, and Brodinski and Canblaster chopped up the single and compiled it into a pulsating, sprawling seven-minute remix.

@CreatorsProject

Immortalizing a moment—that’s Kodak’s job, right?

Evan Roth would say otherwise. Roth is an accomplished digital media artist who approaches his work with a hacker philosophy. As pop culture, time, and space speed by, Roth’s work encourages us to think about pauses and stillness.

One of his most characteristic and well-known projects is Graffiti Analysis. As its namesake suggests, Graffiti Analysis is an extensive ongoing study in the motion of graffiti. The project consists of custom-created software designed for graffiti artists to create a visualizing element to the subtle gestures that go into creating a tag. The motion data from the graffiti is documented, analyzed, and then translated into Graffiti Markup Language (.gml) files. The specialized XML format is designed to be compatible with the archiving process of the graffiti motion data.

But the project does not stop there. One of Roth’s recent developments is a continuation of Graffiti Analysis called Cap (Graffiti Analysis Series). This sculpture series came to life by analyzing graffiti artists’ movement through space (similarly to the previous project) with the added step of translating that data into a 3D printed model. Roth used algorithms to capture the motions of Cap—an artist featured in the 1983 documentary Style Wars. The finished sculptures are made from Chrome-dipped ABS Thermoplastic.

Check out the beginning process below:

Images courtesy of Evan-Roth.com.

[via Lost At E Minor]

@embovoy

Rajeev Basu craves strong reactions. The British artist, currently based in Boulder, Colorado has a knack for creating online projects that can irk or delight you, depending on your temperament. After enabling the average web user to hijack any web page with GIFs, remix their alarm clocks, and express themselves through the Gay Alphabet, Basu is now offering any interested parties a chance to own their very own Harrigan Drone. You know you’ve always wanted one.

Design your drone here.

Basu’s Mr Drones website is a satirical look at an item that’s been steadily gaining more and more media attention over the past couple of years, be it for their use in US military campaigns, or for the consumer-sized drones that more resemble seriously phenomenal toys. He’s making light of their eventual ubiquity by anticipating what it could eventually be like to have drone advertising thrown at us. “I was curious to explore how everyday folks will react to thousands of drones buzzing about over their homes. That’s because in the US, commercial drone use becomes legal in 2015. FAA estimates that 30,000 will be in our skies by 2020. So I created a hoax site called Mr Drones selling the ultra powerful drones of tomorrow, today.”

Mr Drones allows you to pick a color for your drone and even give it a custom paint job, all within your browser. Paint directly onto the rotating 3D model and share your location, and it’ll show you what your customized drone will look like flying around on your street.

My ugly ass drone. Don’t judge.

There’s no denying that drones are everywhere these days, and the controversy over their use by our military has kept them as a topic of hot debate. The drone has come to be a symbol of faceless violence, and of the harmful uses of technology, and being has such has inspired art that serves as commentary. Our sister site Motherboard‘s resident drone expert Brian Anderson weighed in on the merit of Basu’s and other drone-themed art.

“As the technology proliferates, we’re seeing more and more artists grappling with the heavier issues that drones present—killing, of course, but also basic privacy rights. For instance, recently in San Diego an artist created a fake drone crash site on a college campus, and it’s my opinion that something has infiltrated popular consciousness when you see more and more artists commenting, inverting, etc.”

@ImYourKid

Along with the gifts, the festive anthems, and the chocolates, one of the best parts of the holiday season is definitely the Christmas decorations. Here’s a list of the most inventive decorations we’ve seen so far this year. Did we miss something? Leave your favorites in the comments below…

CHRISTMASLIGHTS IN MADRID

Every year Madrid’s city council invites an architect or a designer to decorate the streets with festive lighting. This year, Teresa Sapey’s architecture firm was chosen to conceive the lighting for Serrano Street, one of the most luxurious neighborhoods in Madrid. They decorated the streets with colorful geometric shapes, using thousands of LEDs in the process.
[via]

THECHRISTMASWISHMACHINE

This year The Mill collaborated with INT Works to create an interactive installation that turns tweets into paper snowflakes. Submit a wish via Twitter to @TheMillWishes, and your wish will be printed on a unique paper snowflake and added to the snowstorm on London’s Great Marlborough Street. For every flake, 10 pence is donated to the national charity organization Crisis UK. See the machine in action here.
[via]

THECOMMUNITREE

The Communitree was created by the brands ScentSicles and Balsam Hill, who partenered to celebrate community through technology. From November 19th-November 21st, users were invited to control a robotic tree decorator by logging in via Facebook. For every decoration attempt, both brands donated $5 to the Toys for Tots Foundation.
[via]

tha ltd.

Creative group tha ltd. designed a miniature gingerbread town equipped with a live camera feed and SMS interactivity. The display, installed in the Yurakucho MUJI store in Toyko, Japan, is composed of 100 gingerbread houses with embedded monitors displaying holidays Tweets and Instagram pictures. Use the hashtag #mujixmas to participate, or watch the live feed.

Abies Electronicus

French Creators 1024 architecture conceived a reinterpretation of the classical Christmas tree as an architectural sculpture augmented with lights, sounds, and visuals. It will be on display until December 28th in Brussels, Belgium as part of the event Plaisir d’hiver. According to 1024, “The tree trunk is composed of a stairway which leads the visitor to an unprecedented panoramic view (19 metres high) of the Market Square and the centre of Brussels.”
[via].

@CreatorsProject

A paper-folded version of the European city of Utrecht in the Netherlands is populated with inhabitants of classic films in this inventive and experimental short Distorted Times by Gideon van der Stelt.

The paper version of Utrecht was filmed using a Canon 7D, with the movie snippets added later using After Effects, to create this filmic fantasy landscape.

It’s a landscape where scenes from movies like Rear Window and Life of Brian take place among paper cut outs to create a surreal combination of techniques—all set in an Escherian/German Expressionistic environment of angulated buildings and warped perspectives.

[via Vimeo]

@stewart23rd

It’s one of those cliches that everyone’s got a book inside them. And that doesn’t mean you’ve just chewed your way through War and Peace, but that we all have one novel sitting inside our brains, unwritten, just waiting to hit the Kindle bestseller list. However, writing a novel is tough—all those words, all those ideas, plus you have to put it all together in a narrative unless you want to go all Joycean—but then you’ll never get rich quick.

So, why not let an algorithm do the hard work for you? They owe us anyway for letting them take over the world. This is what programmer Philip M. Parker, a professor at INSEAD, has created: an algorithmic system that takes raw data from internet searches and databases and magics it into book form using a template, so that us non-machines can digest it easier. He’s managed to create hundreds of thousands of books this way and lots of them are for sale on Amazon through his name and his company EdgeMaven Media.

But before any budding Dostoevskys start getting paranoid, the books aren’t the sort of prose we’d consider literature. Instead these automated creations are compilations and reports which follow a certain formula and are generated after people pick a specific topic they want to know about. So it’s books about fascinating topics like The 2007-2012 World Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats (a snip at $795) or Webster’s English to Haitian Creole Crossword Puzzles: Level 1—still a better love story than Twilight though.

[via DVICE]

@stewart23rd

If you’re one of the many people who rushed to download Google’s new iOS map app, then you’ll know what a privacy-invading little thing it is. More than just content to help us get from A to B, it also wants to know our home address and collect data regarding our movements so it can improve its services—which basically means it’s spying on us, so it can gather info about where we’ve been and what our interests are so its advertisers can target us more effectively.

This culture of spying is what artist Neil Mendoza looks at in his mobile sculpture I Spy. The work is made up of four Android tablets that make up a face of two eyes, a nose, and a mouth which can follow people around and track our movements using a Kinect—gazing back at us in a literal interpretation of the inconspicuous data-gathering our devices do on a day-to-day basis.

Mendoza explains:

This piece questions the role that all of the little gadgets we use from day to day play in our lives. Frequently, they are a form of escapism, used to avoid thinking and interacting by staring into the information space. Often they are being used as a tool to spy on us and gather data about our habits. For once, they are “consciously” staring back at us, moving and following viewers around.

@stewart23rd

Each week we pay homage to a select “Original Creator”—an iconic artist from days gone by whose work influences and informs today’s creators. These are artists who were innovative and revolutionary in their fields—bold visionaries and radicals, groundbreaking frontiersmen and women who inspired and informed culture as we know it today. This week: Orson Welles.

If you have even a passing interest in film and the moving image than you’ll be familiar with the name Orson Welles. He’s a giant of the silver screen who, with his seminal work Citizen Kane (1941)—along with cinematographer Gregg Toland—helped shaped the visual vocabulary of modern film. Notable techniques they used were deep focus, low and varied camera angles, film noir-style deep shadows, camera moving through objects, and atypical lighting—and while these dramatic techniques weren’t new, it was Citizen Kane that gelled then together with skill, flair, and acumen.

As well as its visual artistry, the film was narratively unconventional with a non-linear story and was also notable for bucking the trend of the studio system of the time. Instead of being controlled by this system, which was at its zenith, Citizen Kane was made with complete freedom so Welles and his collaborators were allowed to do whatever they liked—which was unprecedented.

Camera moving through different objects: a sign and a glass ceiling in Citizen Kane.

They also harnessed the technological achievements and breakthroughs of the time to create a truly cutting-edge piece of filmmaking. To add to all these manifold glories it’s entertainment as high art, an art film that has mass appeal with a gripping populist story—one which follows the scandalous life of media mogul Charles Foster Kane (inspired by William Randolph Hearst)—and comes complete with a great twist ending, ticking all the boxes you need, thus confirming its inclusion in film studies classes ever since.

As well as creating that film behemoth, Welles was also a playful artist who liked to toy with the audiences he entertained. This was most notable in his radio play The War of the Worlds, a dramatization of the HG Wells novel, which saw him terrify listeners into thinking the play was real when it was broadcast on October 30, 1938.

A poignant moment in F for Fake.

Another of his projects which revealed his mischievous side was his sort-of-documentary F for Fake (1973), which focuses on the story of art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, who was himself partial to creating fake works, notably a biography of Howard Hughes. It’s a mind-bending film which constantly plays with the idea of truth, challenging the viewer and confronting them, toying with what’s real in both Hory’s work, Irving’s role as his biographer, and the story that the film presents to us. You’ll left not knowing what’s fiction and what’s fact.

The incredible opening shot from Touch of Evil.

Along with The Magnificent Ambersons (1941) and his version of Shakespeare’s Othello (1952), another of Welles’ classic films is Touch of Evil (1958). The film opens with one of the greatest tracking shots in the history of everything ever—a three-minute crane shot that takes the viewer on a journey across the US border into Mexico, introducing us into a murky underworld that sets the tone for the rest of this influential film noir.

As well as creating film masterpieces and messing with our heads, Welles was also a fine actor, cropping up as the villainous but alluring Harry Lime in classic British movie The Third Man (1949), delivering the movie’s climatic speech about violence and culture. And, of course, he was in The Muppet Movie (1979) and his final filmic outing, perhaps his finest (if you were 10 years old), was voicing Unicron in the animated film The Transformers: The Movie (1986).

@stewart23rd

To get an idea of how many ridiculous and useless, yet charming products Japan churns out, you can refer to any of the countless online lists of “Crazy Japanese Inventions.” As ridiculous as they are, a lot of things actually have a purpose. The toothpick hand allows you to be discrete and classy, the Boyfriend Pillow is actually quite comforting, and your kids are definitely more charming when they’re smiling. However, we’ve been researching all morning, and it looks like there is not a single functional use out there for the EaTheramin.

Every time you take a bite, you complete the circuit and trigger a sound, whether it’s a little sneezy-sounding thing or the more typical Theramin tone. Pointless. But before we throw Japanese R&D under the bus, let’s consider that America has come out with our own silly inventions. Just look at the Slap Chop… OK, I’d still rather have the Slap Chop.

[via: Lost at E Minor]

@ImYourKid

Consider the sheer, overwhelming intensity of the installations shown in the video above and then picture them all in one place. That was the scene at the Knowledge Olympics, the largest professional education competition in the Americas. Fashion designer Ronaldo Fraga created a multimedia show with the idea that knowledge can take you anywhere in the world. And that’s exactly what the installations did, stirring up feelings and taking the audience to a chaotic and stunning Tokyo, to the heart of a volcano, out in the rain, and into the desert.

Fraga was in charge of the art direction and the environments were created by architects Paulo Waisberg and Clarissa Neves, while Henrique Roscoe (VJ 1mpar) handled of programming, interactivity, creation, design, and both 2D and 3D animations. Brayhan Hawryliszyn did the design and video editing, and Fabiano Fonseca was responsible for the sound design. “We were commissioned to do everything involving video, mapping, audio, and interactivity. The briefs we got were really open to our own creation,” said Roscoe.

Tree of Knowledge was one of the interactive installations. “We thought about a tree that would grow and flow according to visitors’ positions. Its movements were conceptually related to knowledge, as it tried to “hug” viewers and grow with them. Its thin-edged branches represented the sharp way knowledge can change people,” said Roscoe, who also explained that he developed the project with vvvv software, using a Kinect as a sensor to capture visitors’ movements. According to Roscoe, “It’s a combination of video scenery with a generative tree, both running on vvvv. The operation is quite simple: when there’s no one in the room, the tree is just a young sapling that stays still. When someone steps into the area within the sensor’s reach, it quickly grows and becomes a tree. As visitors move and change positions in the X and Y axis lines (horizontal and vertical), its branches flow in different directions, while if someone moves in the Z axis (going closer or farther from it), it changes size."

Here’s a small piece showing only the Tree of Knowledge:

Next, Roscoe told us about the other installations, each of them vastly different from the next. While some relied on mapped projections, others used LED panels, and there was also one with a cube made out of Solaris LEDs wrapped in G-lec frames.

Tokyo

Tokyo: a technological metropolis where so many things are happening at once. Here we did the videos for two mirrored panels, where there was a city with building facades that displayed moving images. We designed an entire city, which was explored by several camera movements.

Water

The commissioners’ initial idea was to have rain projected on the walls, so we did some video scenography with several circles, each one with the image of a raindrop falling and the sound it makes. Over time, the number of drops increased until it became a storm. In this environment, we mapped two walls with this scenography and ten circles on the floor, with images related to the water theme.

Volcano

There was this low-resolution LED panel where we inserted images simulating the movement of magma inside the earth until it goes out to the surface as lava. This was in a more graphical, nonrealistic fashion. We also did an environment called Desert, mapping the walls and the ceiling with more realistic images of the sky and clouds, also using a soundtrack.

According to the organization of the Knowledge Olympics, nearly 250 thousand people attended the event, which took place during November 12th to 18th at the Anhembi Complex in São Paulo.

@CreatorsProject

Blithe Field‘s album covers are sentimental family photos, which works pretty damn well with the nostalgia-laden melodies of his songs. While it’s all very soothing and meditative, he also knows how to drop in thumping beat at just the right intensity level to keep things mellow yet driven. Such is the case on “Andrew’s Lake,” the song he broke down for this week’s LAYERS. Let’s dive in.

Drums

So this layer is pretty self-explanitory and a bit boring, but I forgot how off-beat they are for the most part because I didn’t want to quantize or anything, which is sort of silly in retrospect, but I suppose it worked out. I think these originally came from your run-of -the-mill preset drum kit with a bit of pitching/effects.

Andrew’s Tape

So this is my favorite layer, for likely obvious reasons. Instead of just uploading the stem with “HELLO” and the cooing sound on loop, I went back and found the source tape that I pulled those samples from. This turned into hours of going through tapes and finding a handful of really great things I thought I’d lost. Anyway, this tape came in a micro cassette recorder i got from my friend Andrew when he left school to go adventuring (and subsequently left most of his possessions behind). That was the basis for this track and it’s fun to go back and hear the context of the samples (which are relatively nonsensical, but you know). Both samples from the final song occur towards the end.

Bass and Lead

I remember when I did the bass for this I was really excited because I had just figured out how to do muting on the MPC which allowed me to make the jumpy sound where when one note plays, the previous one gets cut off. I had always been fond of [this technique] but never knew how to do it. I believe I just used a normal acoustic guitar for this and pitched it down, because I’ve never owned a bass or bass synth. The lead guitar was a last minute addition thrown into the mix, and you can kind of tell because it is a bit off-tempo from the rest of the song—I knew this when I was making it, but for some reason that escapes me now. I wasn’t able to re-record it.

Guitar Tape

This is where the main loop from the song comes in. For this I did the same as the vocal samples, went back and found the original tape so you can hear the cut in its context. This time I went ahead and put the actual segment at the beginning for those who don’t want to sift through the rest. Around this time, I was recording a lot of random guitar stuff to tape to sample later. I would tape down the record buttons on a toy recorder and just doodle on guitar then go through it later. That’s actually how a lot of Warm Blood came about—you can hear the main loop to another song or two from the album in this cut as well as if you listen carefully. I had the recorder running through a flanger because at this time I wanted the album to be super flanger heavy. This idea kinda got lost somewhere along the line, but it definitely gets showcased in “Andrew’s Lake.”

Put them all together and here’s what you get, “Andrew’s Lake” by Blithe Field.

@ImYourKid

I don’t know if it’s the dark, gloomy weather in New York, the stress of the upcoming holidays, or just a case of the Mondays, but this morning I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Once I got to work, a friend jokingly reminded me that the end of the world is near, and that could be why I was feeling out of whack. December 21st could just mark the beginning of a new era, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see. With that in mind, we bring you our favorite interpretations of the post-apocalyptic future. Not surprisingly, they all deal with cyborgs or zombies. See you on the other side… maybe.

Factory Fifteen: Robots of Brixon

Filmmaking collective Factory Fifteen‘s short, Robots of Brixon, portrays the rise of a robotic workforce through the eyes of some bots who wake up in a dreamy naturalistic reality before an inevitable riot breaks out. It’s a beautifully made film, with a very uneasy ending.

Neon Indian: “Polish Girl” by Tim Nackashi

For Neon Indian‘s “Polish Girl,” director Tim Nackashi envisioned the story of a lonely humanoid who spends his days scanning people’s bodies and thoughts in pursuit of tracking down a long lost love. This view is decidedly more cyber punk than we imagine the future to be, but the erie digital light painting trails give it a slick finish. Watch our behind-the-scenes making-of video here.

Cassette Playa: KARMAGEDDON F/W 2012

If the world’s really going to end this week, you might as well go out on a high note. Cassette Playa’s F/W 2012 collection (and fashion film directed by Weirdcore) suggests preparing for the pending apocalypse by partying hard. If this is how you choose to spend your last night on earth, more power to you. Designer Carri Munden weighs in on dressing for the apocalypse here.

N1ON Productions: True Skin

If you think Times Square is overwhelming, just look at all the distracting screens and holographics portrayed in N1ON‘s dystopian short True Skin. If this future becomes reality, augmented skin and body mods will be the norm and we’ll have the ability to live forever. There’s some truly advanced stuff in this simultaneously dark and bright future.

HEALTH: “Tears” by David Altobelli and Jeff Desom

Speaking of a dark future, the short film for HEALTH‘s “Tears,” directed by David Altobelli and Jeff Desom, is absolutely terrifying. If you think The Walking Dead is creepy, wait until you check out the zombie babies in the video above. We’re not sure why or how they’re like that, but the kids look so realistic that this video might give us nightmares, again. Read about the insane VFX in our interview.

@kfloodwarning

The relationship between filmmaking and technological progress is one that’s been deeply intertwined since the beginning of cinema as we know it, so it’s only fitting that our present era of accelerated technological development should lead to some mind-blowing new forms of cinematic expression. The Creators Project teamed up with art and technology center Eyebeam, and world-renown visual effects company Framestore, to bring together hand-picked teams of filmmakers, creative coders, animators, designers, and sound designers to imagine what new tools, techniques, and forms of storytelling might emerge from this creative collision.

The New Cinema hackathon began as conversations and email exchanges between teams, which were assembled by Eyebeam and The Creators Project. The goal was to give teams time to come up with a narrative concept for their projects, as well as an opportunity to think about how they might achieve it, and what kind of tools and resources they might need towards that end. Preparation for the hackathon included a motion capture session with a Michael Jackson impersonator in Framestore’s London office, researching eye scanning and the analysis of irises, and several dives into Framestore’s vast archives of 3D models, animations, and footage.

The five teams that came together this weekend were tasked with only one objective: to imagine and prototype new and unusual forms of visual storytelling. Their approaches were varied both in content and in tone, but the projects were united by their fearless experimentation and enthusiasm for the ideas being explored.

We’ll be unveiling the projects in the coming weeks on the blog, as well as on the New Cinema and Eyebeam websites. A public presentation of the completed projects will be exhibited at Eyebeam from January 29th-February 3rd.

Rone’s album Tohu Bohu, which he told us about recently, kicked off with the release of a striking music video. “Parade” continued the story begun in “Gravity,” both of which followed the bright adventures of a floating girl, cleverly kept off the ground through meticulous editing. The newest video, however, takes a darker turn.

The trippy black and white music video for “Bye Bye Macadam” (see above) carries us away into a mystical spatial ritual, somewhere between a dream and a cosmic hallucination. As the story unfolds, we follow a beautiful star, and then follow it from its birth to its death. The light flickers to the rhythm before disappearing into a black hole. With “Bye Bye Macadam,” we’re once again diving into Rone’s ethereal universe as envisioned in the animations by French filmmaker Dimitri Stankowicz.

We spoke with both Rone and Stankowicz to found out how they created a project that is so simple, complex, and beautiful at the same time.

The Creators Project: How did you two meet? How did the concept of “Bye Bye Macadam” come about?
Dimitri Stankowicz: I knew Rone a little bit thanks to a mutual friend, Vladimir Mavounia Kouka, who also directs animated films. I was contacted by the record label InFiné to conceive a music video for Tohu Bohu’s release. After a few discussions with Rone, we agreed to collaborate on a project. Everything went pretty smoothly and naturally.

Rone: My friend Vladimir, who directed the video for “Spanish Breakfast” and my album cover introduced us. I knew I could blindly trust him. And it was easy for me to get the general picture by looking at Dimitri’s previous works. Many of his music videos were unofficial, but I love what he did for Chris Clark and Björk. But I didn’t get involved that much in the music video process—I don’t want to restrain the creative people I work with, just like I wouldn’t like them to restrain me. And I was offered a wonderful, intense video.

Preparatory sketches from Dimitri Stankowicz.

This video is really different from what we’ve seen so far—was that intentional?
Rone: It’s just a new collaboration, and that’s what I like so much about working with many different people. I love when my universe and theirs collide, it provokes interesting contrasts. Ludovic Duprez’s (from Studio Fünf) world is very different from Vladimir Mavounia Kouka’s, for instance. It’s also important to mention “Parade,” which is actually my first music video with real footage. When Dimitri told me he wanted to work with black and white visuals, I was very excited. It’s true that many of my videos are pretty colourful, but this is not an intentional break.

Stankowicz: This graphical rupture came naturally. I wanted to change from the paper cut aesthetics I’m accustomed to. For a long time, I was longing to come back to traditional drawings and animations. Since I had so much freedom on this project, I was able to give free rein to my imagination. My main idea was to create something subjective about my feelings on the atmosphere of “Bye Bye Macadam.”

When looking at the music video, I felt like I was witnessing a strange ritual from a cult devoted to the cosmos. What were your inspiration models for this project? Where does this mystical aspect come from?
Stankowicz: For this music video, I took my inspiration from some modern dances, from shamanism to several astrophysical phenomena. I found very appealing the idea of creating a choreography with a supernova in the background. The video is essentially a loop depicting the different life stages of a star from its creation to its ultimate explosion and its collapse into a black hole. The characters are related to the cosmos, they influence each other. I’ve always wanted to try out a choreography based on sorcery. Instead of using pieces of wood or little bones, the characters play with fire, gravity, and tidal forces. The mystical dimension was reinforced by the fantasy aspect of these interactions.

I didn’t really think of a cult, but rather of a mix between shamanism and Georges Méliès’Selenites. But that’s right, something really dark emerges from this video. Unlike humans, the protagonists have supernatural powers. They’re some sort of pagan deities celebrating their own creation. The film is mysterious enough so that everyone can interpret it in their own way.

Below, check out Rone’s previous videos for “Gravity” and “Parade.”

Images courtesy of Dimitri Stankowicz.

@CreatorsProject

It’s easy to dismiss fruit and vegetables as just food, but you’d be foolish to think they’re incapable of so much more. They’re not just delicious morsels to eat, or force feed kids who just want to munch candy, they can be used as batteries to power lamps and even play live electronic music.

Sticking with the musical theme, artist Scott Garner—who previously brought a still life painting to interactive life—has created an instrument that lets you play drums using beetroots called…wait for it… BeetBox!

Powered by a Raspberry Pi computer housed inside a wooden box, users touch the beets to play beats, so you can hit the vegetables and start laying down the foundation of a killer track while also looking like you’re in a Monty Python sketch. Garner explains his motivations:

BeetBox is primarily an exploration of perspective and expectations. I’m particularly interested in creating complex technical interactions in which the technology is invisible—both in the sense that the interaction is extremely simple and in the literal sense that no electronic components can be seen.

Sure it might not last too long once the rot sets in, but It was worth creating for the pun alone.

[via Design Boom]

@stewart23rd

It’s not always a good idea to discuss your dreams—they never make sense and it’s really boring for the other person—let along visualise them in an animation, because who knows what your subconscious might come up with when you’e in slumberland. But there’s always exceptions, especially if your dream was an interplanetary, kaleidoscopic journey into twisted abstractions of the human body.

That’s what Pask D’Amico did with the above animation L’Homme Grotesque, which resulted from 123 days of toil after he awoke one day dreaming about a mouth that spoke to him from the heart of the galaxy. A mouth that told him about humanity’s unique place in the universe, how time was a falsehood, and other cosmic insights.

The grotesque imaginings and fleshy fractals that are the products of D’Amico’s dream-mind at times look like the stuff of nightmares (particularly Cyriak’s nightmares), but it’s a visually entertaining trip nonetheless.

[via Vimeo]

@stewart23rd

It’s winter, which is traditionally a time for headwear to guard against the chill, but with New Year’s Eve coming up sometimes you want your headwear to be a little bit party-fabulous. I wouldn’t know anything about that, but Younghui Kim and Yejin Cho do, as they’ve created this 3D printed hat embedded with LEDs that light up, changing when the wearer tilts their head.

Looking like something Zelda Fitzgerald might’ve worn had she invented a time-machine and journeyed to the future to steal some LEDs, it’s called Gravity of Light. And the idea was based on thinking about how light on the surface of the hat would act if it was affected by gravity, as if it were water.

The result is the knitted-looking hat above, covered in lights that react when the wearer moves their head, turning on or off and swaying from side-to-side. It’s a great idea, it’s just a shame it’s only a concept and won’t be in the shops in time for New Year.

[via Gizmag]

@stewart23rd

Portable gaming takes a turn for the wearable with the project Woven from Christiaan Ribbens and Patrick Kersten, which is an “e-wearable (game) platform”.

The word “game” is in brackets because it’s not just a game platform, but is a multifunctional, wearable, motion-controlling device which can be used to interact with your phone, connect to the internet, used as a game controller, a TV remote, and to play video games in public, if you don’t mind the strange looks.

Yeah, they might look a bit daft flaying their arms about and you’d have to be down with the fashion statement of looking like you’d just chowed down on some LEDs for lunch. But the prototype shows the possibilities of what wearable tech can do, even if the design isn’t perfect yet.

[via PSFK]

@stewart23rd