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kottke.org posts about Max Cooper

A Sense of Getting Closer

With music by Max Cooper and visuals by Conner Griffith, A Sense of Getting Closer is a music video that was inspired by a quote submitted to Cooper’s On Being project:

I have a sense of getting closer to something which my life depends on. I can sense it but I cannot tell if I should be excited or terrified about what will happen.

Mesmerizing. Like literally, given that it’s based on “a hypnotic light show we can’t look away from, yet we know is made up of low-quality content fed to us by engagement algorithms.” (via @aaroncoleman.bsky.social)

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Max Cooper, Repetition

This music video, directed by Kevin McGloughlin for Max Cooper’s song Repetition, features remixed fractal-like forms from the constructed world (roads, skyscrapers, wind turbines, etc.) interspersed with scenes from nature. Totally mesmerizing. (You’ve got a give it a minute to get going though, especially if you’re not a fan of gradual repetitive music. I was in a trance by the end. ๐Ÿ˜ตโ€๐Ÿ’ซ)

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Order from Chaos, a mesmerizing video of emergence

French visual effects artist Maxime Causeret took a track from Max Cooper’s album Emergence and created these wonderful biologically inspired patterns and interactions.

Maxime also shows us a section of animated reaction-diffusion patterns, where simple chemical feedback mechanisms can yield complex flowing bands of colour โ€” these forms of system were originally thought up by Alan Turing, and were part of the early seeds of the field of systems biology, which seeks to simulate life with computers, in order to better understand the systems producing the complexity we see in the living world. They were also the starting point of my main research area many years ago before I got lost in music! (where I began with the question of what patterns could be produced via reaction-diffusion forms of system as opposed to gene-regulatory network controlled patterning).

There’s a blue brain coral pattern at the 1:30 mark and a neuron-ish pattern at 2:30 that I wish would go on forever. Headphones recommended, psychoactive drugs optional. (via colossal)