Tag: media

what mash-ups are meant to be, when the medium is partly the message

thru-you.com, by Kutiman

Music + (Video/Sample) x Mash-up = Sexy

“What you are about to see is a mix of unrelated YouTube videos/clips
edited together to make ThruYou. In other words, what you see is what you hear.
Check out the credits for each video – you might find yourself…”


Unbelievable. Kutiman’s ambitious project, to create an astonishing album of meta-song videos slash home-sampled music made up of a ridiculously complicated collection of cleverly layered YouTube videos, is entirely successful. It sounds half-baked, especially given every song is a different genre, like the sort of thing an undergrad would try to throw together for a media studies class because it sounded relevant on paper and they could use words like “synergy” and “interscape” in the artist statement. Instead? It’s amazing and I’m thrilled. The videos are bloody brilliant, super impressive, as unexpected as they are incredible and compelling. As someone on StumbleUpon said, “I can’t favorite this hard enough.”

I’ve actually been trying to post this for days, but the site’s been down. Hit by too many people, Kutiman’s bandwidth went bork. Now that it’s back, set aside twenty minutes, turn up your volume, turn off your power saving screen settings, and expect to have your socks knocked off.

starring that 1 guy as a scruffy, scruffy bass player. how shocking

As a one hundred percent fantastic welcome back celebration, Duncan‘s using his night at the weekly secret film school to present…

THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT
a movie so good that it was introduced to me as a way to get into my pants.
(Just typing that in caps sets the music off in my head)

“Space travel has become a dirty way of life dominated by derelicts, grease monkeys, and hard-boiled interplanetary traders such as Samuel Curtis. Written, directed and starring Cory McAbee of the legendary cult band The Billy Nayer Show, this sci-fi, musical-western uses flinty black and white photography, rugged Lo-Fi sets and the spirit of the final frontier. We follow Curtis on his Homeric journey to provide the all-female planet of Venus with a suitable male, while pursued by and enigmatic killer, Professor Hess. The film features music by The Billy Nayer Show and some of the most original rock ‘n’ roll scenes ever committed to film.”

Tuesday, December 9, doors at 7:30, Vancouver Film School, 400 W. Hastings Street


facebook event page

shiny shiny shiny, who’s going and to which?

KRAZYTALK! A Speaker Series held in conjunction with KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art, May 15th – June 4th.

May 15th, 7 pm
ART SPIEGELMAN, comic artist
Centre for Digital Media, Great Northern Way Campus, 577 Great Northern Way

A major figure in the underground comics movement of the 1960s and 70s, Spiegelman is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic memoir Maus, which retraces his parents story as Holocaust survivors. Formerly named one of the 100 Most Influential People of our times by Time Magazine, he continues to be a political activist and a public champion for innovative comic book work.

May 23rd, 7 pm
MICHAEL AMZALAG and MATHIAS AUGUSTYNIAK, M/M (Paris), art directors/graphic designers
Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street

Graphic designers Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak founded M/M Paris in 1992. Their work has been shown in art galleries and museums all over the world, most recently in the 2008 exhibition Vision Tenace at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Their projects are created in partnership with such diverse designers and artists as Stella MacCartney, Yohji Yamamoto, Douglas Gordon and Bjork.

May 29the, 7 pm
TIM JOHNSON, animation film maker
Centre for Digital Media, Great Northern Way Campus, 577 Great Northern Way

DreamWorks Animation film director Tim Johnson directed the 2006 computer animated comedy Over the Hedge, starring the voices of Bruce Willis and Gary Shandling. His earlier projects include the animated action adventure Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas and DreamWorks first computer animated comedy, Antz, as well as the infamous segment Homer3D from The Simpsons Halloween special Treehouse of Horror VI.

June 4, 7 pm
WILL WRIGHT, god of computer game designers
Centre for Digital Media, Great Northern Way Campus, 577 Great Northern Way

Widely acknowledged as one of the most important innovators in gaming, technology and entertainment, Will Wright is the designer of the groundbreaking computer simulation games SimCity and The Sims, the bestselling computer game of all time. Wright has received two lifetime achievement awards from Game Developers Choice Awards and was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in 2002.

TICKETS: 604.662.4717
SERIES OF FOUR PRESENTATIONS: $85, Members and seniors $68, students $34.
INDIVIDUAL PRESENTATIONS: $25, Members and seniors $20, students $10.

I have an inspiring announcement to make!

Three dear and glorious women

– musician Meredith Yayanos, artist Zoetica Ebb and photographer Nadya Lev –

are launching a new magazine!

“COILHOUSE is a love letter to alternative culture, written in an era when alternative culture no longer exists. And because it no longer exists, we take from yesterday and tomorrow, from the mainstream and from the underground, to construct our own version. We cover art, fashion, technology, music and film to create an alternative culture that we would like to live in, as opposed to the one that’s being sold or handed down to us. The result, in the form of articles, features and interviews, is laid out on our blog and in our print magazine for all to see. If our Utopia is your Utopia, then welcome! Anyone can contribute, and we encourage you to go to our submission page and get in touch..

We will also have guest writers, and we welcome comments and submissions! We’re don’t yet have a release date for Issue 1, but it will be soon, and you will know about it. To tide you over in the meantime, blog posts will be a-plenty!”

Please visit COILHOUSE and get involved! If you like it, SPREAD THE WORD! They place great emphasis and importance on the process of sharing and collaboration, so feel free to repost any and all pertinent information elsewhere. Especially the flyer here or the one found here.

COILHOUSE can also be found on the following places on the web:

COILHOUSE on MySpace
COILHOUSE Flickr Stream – sometimes contains “bonus images” relating to various posts
COILHOUSE LiveJournal RSS Feed

soon there will be pictures, too

Heart of the World in the Globe & Mail. The tone’s a little unfortunate, (like how I’m not sure why the seats were picked on – they’re red and comfy, actually), but I deeply appreciate the exposure. People have been contacting me, as did the CBC.

We have 10 days left to find investors. If you can think of anyone you haven’t told yet, do so now.

what I get up instead of sleeping properly

Johnny Rotton on Judge Judy.

Sanex has created a beautiful film that transforms over 100 naked strangers into living skin cells for their new brand campaign. A UK exclusive, it just went live this week. The mesmerizing advert, built to sell how Sanex different from other skincare products because it works with your skin’s natural processes to “keep it at its healthy best”, was made in only three days by Director Lucy Blaksted, with a crew of 45, which included four skin airbrush artists.

This style seems to be part of a trend. Vaseline did two shorts this year that also featured astonishingly nice use of naked people – Sea, which has beautifully placed people in enchanting situations I wish I could have been part of, it sparks of a seriously fantastic art director, someone who could maybe make me cry, and Locked, which is lighter in tone and only uses hands.

Dolphin’s leap crushes woman in freak accident.

Stuck is a nice piece of work too. A two minute viral spot promoting a Canadian Becel Margarine contest, it uses the idea of an escalator break-down to play nicely on public assumptions of transportation. The type-casting is a little strong, but I think it works well. Apparently it’s based on a short film created back in 2003 by the writer/director that I’ve been unable to track down. The cute 30 second TV version is available on ihaveanidea.org, (appropriately, as it’s a margarine ad, a contender for “slimmest website”).

Heavy snow falls in Jerusalem; dozens injured due to bad weather.

While we’re on the topic of art tied to the hand of advertising, V&A and Playstation® sponsored something interesting this season, ‘Volume’ – an array of columns that respond to movement set in the centre of the V&A’s John Madejski Garden in London. A luminous interactive sculpture, the columns have been programmed to respond to movement with startling audio-visual displays that ripple complexity. On the surface this sounds hokey, a science-centre trick from the 80’s that’s been done countless times before, but the photos by John Adrian are unexpectedly lovely. The striking placement of the pillars and the obvious depth of the patterns mix so nicely with everyone’s obvious delight that it makes me wish I could hear the project as well as see it. It seems like such a perfect thing to stave off the darkness of winter.

(mcstrick, who put up the Volume pictures I linked to, also posted about Jeongmee Yoon, the artist behind the eerie Pink & Blue Project, a collection of photographs wherein children are almost lost in the vast mono-colour array of their blandly gender-coded belongings.)

contact, we have contact

Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex

Tomorrow there shall be another gathering at Andrew’s house to watch the Ghost In The Shell TV series, called “Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex”. We have watched the first 14 episodes and will be continuing from there.

Feel free to bring snacks.

Where Call me or Andrew if you don’t know.
When Show up for 8 pm, we’ll wait a little bit for latecomers before starting. We’ll go til we get tired.
Who If you know either me or Andrew, you’re invited. Simple as that.

Tonight, darling Imogyne has surprised me with a ticket to the Hawksley Workman concert tonight at the Cultch. I’m devlishly pleased, though I’m leery on the details of who that actually is. I think I have a mash-up cover of Striptease on my home computer that wasn’t too bad.

  • New TV on the Radio video for Dreams.
  • Lucky, a short film by Nash Edgerten.
  • an essential Drinking Driving Awareness commercial.

    • gm denied, yo

    “We tried traps. But the cat is too stupid for standard moosetraps–I’m afraid she’d get caught–and the glue traps were just tragic. There’s nothing like pulling out the fridge and seeing a dejected ton of moose huddled in the corner, looking at you with enormous brown eyes, each hoof glued solidly down to the floor.”

  • Update on Sub-Genius Child Custody Case.

    GM is running a contest to “make your own” commercial for the gas-guzzling Tahoe SUV. General Motors has teamed up with Donald Trump’s ‘The Apprentice’ franchise to create a website that allows prospectives to make their own commercials online. The website allows readers to select backgrounds, video shots, and input text in an attempt to win prizes. Instead, they are getting justly served. The internet is finding it’s own uses. Common sense says these won’t be left up for very long, so steal them now.

    one, two, three, four, five, six.

    edit: the best one is the one my roommate Graham made, here.

    • pack up your bags for moskau, kids

    “Hey you!!” “WHAT!” “Nothing…”

    Remember a year ago, that Eurovision Contest Band that Nicholas and I were banging on about so loudly that BoingBoing finally picked it up a month or two later?

    25 years after they disbanded, Dschinghis Khan has returned with a world-wide reunion tour called “Back On Their Horses”.

    A little digging and we find the man who used to play Khan passed away from AIDS complications. When they played at the Olympiyski Arena in Moscow to 30,000 screaming fans on the 17th of December, 2005, they had a replacement. From pictures found here and here, it appears the years have not been as kind as they could have been.

    This is the first video that I found. There were more found by Nicholas, but world save us if we spend the time to dig them up again. We’re already becoming dangerously interested in this retro-disco pop band from before we were born. Any more time spent researching Dschinghis Khan and William Gibson will dedicate a dry mocking paragraph of some short story to describing us in uncanny detail.

    Environment in crisis: ‘We are past the point of no return’

    Of course, a latent obsession with a discontinued gimmick band is admittedly a little outré. It’s much more conventional to share surreal clips of Japanese culture like this nicotine energy drink commercial featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger exploding out of a girl’s head or this happy-hardcore music video featuring a fire-breathing fat man in gold lamé dancing with a harem of pretty, um, genies?

    It’s understandable, a country that gives us such gems as japanese girls versus the syncopated masturbation video of doom“, “japanese girls in meat-visor hats versus the giant lizard” or “japanese girls versus the giant black man” deserves whatever press they can get. (Doesn’t being Bob Sapp in Japan strike you as an excellent way to make a living? To hell with being a Pro Wrestler and K-1 fighter, just cash in on being incredibly big.) In fact, when I discovered “japanese girl in seal hat versus the polar bear“, I think I watched it three times in a row, my hand over my mouth in vague shock each time, more concerned for the bear than the screaming girl.

    However, I think it’s only fair to give the rest of the world’s astounding media a moment in the sun. Like, alright, I know it’s not as weird as the hip thrusting lingerie flamingos, (and what do you even call Shingo Mama no oHa?), it’s more of a catastrophe, but what about the David Hasselhoff Ooga-Chacka video that’s been dominating my friends list? The thing with the fish or the eggs or the flying fairy children are all just as messed up as anything spewed forth from a pop idol incubator. (Don’t even get me started on the green screening. I did better with a painted floor and a second-hand handheld camera that had an eyepiece with a tendency to fall off mid-shot). After all, American Idol has its own trainwrecks, some so spectacular it’s a wonder they don’t bring back the tradition of leaving brain damaged babies in the hills to die of exposure at the Burger King Tender Crisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch.

    Brain scans reveal men’s pleasure in revenge.

    BoingBoing recently featured Heavy Ammunition, for example, who has put together a brilliant clip of the Che-Stormtrooper phenomenon comprised solely of individual photos put together to look like video and put to a catchy hip-hop version of the Vader theme, (Here is where to get the stickers). They also pointed the way to a neat page showing a side-by-side video of an eerily identical Apple commercial and a Postal Service video.

    Not blindingly funny stuff, true, but decidedly as artistic as SHUN! or the classic slap-stick german safety film and about as equally creative as when The Tonight Show rigged a phony free photobooth and created a clip so delightful that LOL becomes LOL and not “I smile gently at this”.

    As an eye-wash, even if you weren’t brave enough to click on anything else in this post, (and shame on you for missing out on the marvelously astonishing photobooth), Everyone must watch this video. That means you, yes you, who is looking at this with skeptic eyes that are already wandering down to what’s in the next entry. Too bad, toughen up, this is where your attention’s at if it knows what’s good for it. If you really must know, it features dogs and lasers, but that tells you nothing, so there was really no point in saying so. GO NOW WITH THE CLICK!

    edit: the dog video is for Vitalic and created by Pleix.