And I’m back; blog vacation is over. Lots to catch up on. Let’s start with…
It’s been a few weeks since Usain Bolt’s celebratory 9.69 second jog, the Olympics are well and done, but I still find myself fascinated by the he’s-either-on-steroids-or-everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-sprinting-is-wrong 100m world record. I catch myself watching the final once or twice a day (I have the video on my phone); it probably won’t cease to amaze me until he finds a tenth of a second in his busy schedule to surpass it.
I, like the large majority of Americans, did not get to watch Bolt’s run live that Saturday morning as exclusive television rights kept major competitions off the air until NBC’s nightly primetime broadcast. That’s not to say I waited until 9pm; I waited about 15 minutes. continue reading »
Been messing around with a little web app and I think I’ve finally got it to a point where it’s worth sharing. The code is an absolute mess, featureless bugs infest every function, playback is super temperamental (just hit refresh) and you can’t pause (yet). But it works:
It’s nothing fancy or particularly useful. In short, you watch (and listen) records uploaded to YouTube by some amazing reggae collectors: firebladerr1, oldwah and mrrk. I first came across this community last summer and what struck me about them was how successfully they’ve been able to digitize the experience of being a record collector. By recording their collections as video, instead of audio, some amount of ownership over the music they’ve collected is maintained. When you watch one of their 45s, you’re very much aware that you’re watching a specific record owned by a specific person. And in so far as that’s the case, I hope some sense of fulfillment as collectors is preserved. Because as much as we talk about property and ownership in information economies and the such, we continually forget to address the emotional aspects of those things. continue reading »
Yes, that’s an elephant carrying a video camera. And yes, that’s a monkey grabbing said camera. For three years, elephants were employed to film a documentary on tigers in Pench National Park, India. BBC reports:
Cameras held by elephants’ trunks have been used to provide an intimate view of tigers in the jungle.
Because the big cats are used to the presence of elephants, the tusked giants were able to get far closer to them than a human film crew ever could.
Thanks to the “trunk-cams”, the team was able to follow four newborn tiger cubs all the way through to adulthood.
The footage was recorded over a period of three years in the Pench National Park in India.
This isn’t strapping electronics to animals. This is elephants trained to carry and set down HD cameras. Watch the videos – it’s even more absurd than it sounds. One camera, which looks a bit like R2D2 disguised as a tree, is equipped with wheels and can be driven around remotely when it’s set down on the jungle floor. continue reading »
The video above, of Daft Punk’s summer performance at Brooklyn’s Keyspan Park, is compiled entirely from footage shot by approximately 250 audience members. When I first saw it, I assumed the constituent videos had naturally emerged from the event and appeared online. I was mistaken, the assembled footage is the product of a coordinated effort, organized by Olivier Gondry (Michel Gondry’s brother) and commissioned by Daft Punk themselves. That’s not to imply something similar couldn’t occur organically. It certainly did when the Boredoms performed 77 BOA DRUM this summer in Brooklyn Bridge Park. [As it turns out, Gondry's video is in fact inspired by the Beastie Boy's movie, Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That] Regardless, the idea of scraping the internet for documentation of an event and compiling it into some sort of collective memory is entirely brilliant. continue reading »
It took nearly 2.5 years since YouTube’s inception for someone to realize that uploading videos of classic reggae 45s playing on a turntable is a really good idea. Just hearing the needle come down on a record used to be enough – countless collectors went about archiving their records as mp3s. But mmrk, MotownMaster, 78MAN and oldwah seem to have all similarly committed to migrating their record collections onto YouTube. They want to see the record spin. Brilliant.
What I especially like about these videos is how aware I am that I’m seeing and hearing a specific record owned by a specific person. And how by maintaining that ownership, some sense of fulfillment for the record collectors seems to be preserved.
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