Monthly Archives: February 2021

Google’s “Play a Kandinsky”: Synesthesia FTW

Design

“What if you could hear color?” asks with Play a Kandinsky, an interactive machine learning experiment created by Google Arts & Culture and Centre Pompidou. “Explore Vassily Kandinsky’s synesthesia and ‘play’ his pioneering masterpiece, Yellow-Red-Blue, with the help of machine learning.”

DesignTaxi writes,

Visitors are guided to click on different colors in an animated canvas. There, they’ll learn what each hue represented to the artist—yellow sounded like trumpets to him, red was the color of violins playing, and looking at blue would elicit a melody of organs in his head.

New eng & marketing opportunities in Adobe video

After Effects

Come join my wife & her badass team!

Amazing footage of Perseverance landing on Mars

Scientific & Technical Imaging

Insanely magical.

The real footage in this video was captured by several cameras that are part of the rover’s entry, descent, and landing suite. The views include a camera looking down from the spacecraft’s descent stage (a kind of rocket-powered jet pack that helps fly the rover to its landing site), a camera on the rover looking up at the descent stage, a camera on the top of the aeroshell (a capsule protecting the rover) looking up at that parachute, and a camera on the bottom of the rover looking down at the Martian surface.

If that’s up your alley, check out this 4K video showing images of the red planet (captured earlier):

Per Laughing Squid,

Elderfox Studios took photographic footage taken by various Mars space rovers and compiled them into an absolutely astonishing 4K rendered video that reveals the surface of Mars. The original photos used in this short but stunning documentary were from NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS, Cornell University and ASU.

War robot + paintball gun + Internet = Art (?)

Miscellaneous

Welcome to late capitalism, MF’s.

From the site:

We’ve put a Spot in an art gallery, mounted it with a .68cal paintball gun, and given the internet the ability to control it. We’re livestreaming Spot as it frolics and destroys the gallery around it. Spot’s Rampage is piloted by YOU! Spot is remote-controlled over the internet, and we will select random viewers to take the wheel.

[Via Rajat Paharia]

Lego Vidiyo promises AR filmmaking for kids

AR/VR

TikTok Micronaxx, here we come!

The high-key nutty (am I saying that right, kids?) thing is that they’ve devised a whole musical persona to go with it, complete with music videos:

L.L.A.M.A. is the first ever Lego mini-figure to be signed to a major label and the building toy group’s debut attempt at creating its own star DJ/ producer.

A cross between a helmet headed artist like Marshmello and a corporate synergy-prone artificial entity like Lil Miquela, L.L.A.M.A., which stands for “Love, Laughter and Music Always” (not kidding), is introducing himself to the world today with a debut single, “Shake.”

It appears that this guy & pals fly around on giant luckdragon-style copies of our goldendoodle Seamus, and I am here for that.

Lego: Nanonaxx Conquer Death Valley

Photography

Do I seem like the kind of guy who’d have tiny Lego representations of himself, his wife, our kids (the Micronaxx), and even our dog? What a silly question. 😌

I had a ball zipping around Death Valley, unleashing our little crew on sand dunes, lonesome highways, and everything in between. In particular I was struck by just how often I got more usable shallow depth-of-field images from my iPhone (which, like my Pixel, lets me edit the blur post-capture) than from my trusty, if aging, DSLR & L-series lens.

Anyway, in case this sort of thing is up your alley, please enjoy the results.

Snowflakes materialize in reverse

Photography

“Enjoy your delicious moments,” say the somewhat Zen pizza boxes from our favorite local joint. In that spirit, let’s stay frosty:

PetaPixel notes,

Jens writes that the melting snowflake video was shot on his Sony a6300 with either the Sony 90mm macro lens or the Laowa 60mm 2:1 macro lens. He does list the Sony a7R IV as his “main camera,” but it’s still impressive that this high-resolution video was shot thanks to one of Sony’s entry-level offerings.