Five things ya gotta watch…

Just a quick one to get the artist inside you turning cartwheels: Very cool videos.

First, a chalkboard animation, Autumn Story, by Yanni Kronenberg and Lucinda Schreiber. It’s set to music by an Australian group I hadn’t heard before but like very much, The Firekites, and it turned up in several Facebook postings almost simultaneously. One frustration: You cannot buy that song on US iTunes, a tragic lack.

Second, Catharine Newell suggested I do a search on “starlings on Otmoor” and watch the resulting video. “Mesmerizing” is the best word for it. I saw something like it in Potomac, Maryland years ago, but not on THIS scale. I wonder what Alfred Hitchcock would have made of it.

There are other videos of this one.

Then there’s an elegant morph of western womens’ portraits over the last five hundred years. You’ve probably already seen it (it was posted in 2007) but I included it here because I rewatched it, and realized that the oldest and newest portraits bear striking similarities. Makes me wonder if, with all our smug, self-congratulatory abstractions, we’re really just going back to the beginning…

Fun exercise: There are 90 different portraits in this video, by (I think) 63 different artists. See how many you can name.

BTW, I started two instantiations of this video about 30 seconds apart. The video’s set to a Bach sarabande for cello, and playing it “in the round” this way produces just enough dissonnance to move it to the jazz side of town. Quite beautiful. I need to try that with other baroque music–could be onto something here.

This one’s a bit older, too, but still an eye-opener. I wonder how many case of Guinness it took to think of it:

And finally, I watched Philippe Faraut age a portrait in class (and we all took a turn). He’s a great aficionade of YouTube, and has graciously repeated the exercise for the public. It’s at once interesting and kinda depressing:

Enjoy!

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