Artist Annette Labedzki has been uploading videos of paint mixing to Instagram and YouTube to great interest. The video above, in which the view is halved and then mirrored, starts off slow but is particularly mesmerizing…I think my brain is addicted to symmetry. Georgia O’Keeffe’s name popped into my brain early on while watching it. (via @colossal)
kottke.org posts about mesmerizing
Mesmerizing paint mixing videos
Memories of Paintings
Meditate in front of your computer for a few minutes with this soothing dreamlike video. (via colossal)
Migration map of American birds
From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, an animated map of the yearly migratory patterns of 118 bird species in the Western Hemisphere.
La Sorte says a key finding of the study is that bird species that head out over the Atlantic Ocean during fall migration to spend winter in the Caribbean and South America follow a clockwise loop and take a path farther inland on their return journey in the spring. Species that follow this broad pattern include Bobolinks, Yellow and Black-billed cuckoos, Connecticut and Cape May warblers, Bicknell’s Thrush, and shorebirds, such as the American Golden Plover.
“These looped pathways help the birds take advantage of conditions in the atmosphere,” explains La Sorte. “Weaker headwinds and a push from the northeast trade winds as they move farther south make the fall journey a bit easier. The birds take this shorter, more direct route despite the dangers of flying over open-ocean.”
The map was created with data from eBird, a database of crowdsourced bird sightings. They also created a follow-up map which labels each of the species. Look at how far Baird’s Sandpiper (#5) flies…all the way from central Argentina to Northern Canada and back. (thx, kevin)
Liquid columns of falling animated people
This is a bunch of animated naked people falling into two precise columns. Mesmerizing. Perhaps a little NSFW? And throw some headphones on…the sound, while subtle, is essential.
See also that video — you remember the one — of a bunch of computer-generated people being mowed down by a rotating bar.
Out-of-control washing machine bounces on trampoline
If you’re keeping tabs at home, this is the third video I’ve posted to kottke.org featuring self-destructing washing machines. While not quite as good as this one — “it seems as though the washer is attempting to turn into the Picasso version of itself” — there’s a sublime moment where this chaotic neutral washing machine seemingly defies gravity by hanging in the air like Michael Jordan.
Slow Motion Surfing
You know what’s pretty? Big waves and surfing in slow motion. Take a break and relax at 1000 fps with this mesmerizing video.
The Hans Zimmer soundtrack only adds to the effect. (via ★interesting)
Walking City
Walking City is a slowly evolving walking video sculpture by Universal Everything. A walking tour of modern architecture, if you will.
File this one under mesmerizing. A deserving winner of the Golden Nica award at Ars Electronica. (via subtraction)
A day in the life of NYC taxis
This clever and well-done visualization shows where individual NYC taxis picked up and dropped off their fares over the course of a day.
Mesmerizing. Has anyone done analysis on which drivers are the most effective and what the data shows as the most effective techniques? The best drivers must have their tricks on where to be at which times to get the most fares. (via @dens)
Every Click
Korean artist group Shinseungback Kimyonghun made a video of every time they clicked their mouse. It’s mesmerizing.
Painting Morgan Freeman
Using an iPad app called Procreate, artist Kyle Lambert made this painting of Morgan Freeman. It took him 200 hours. The video of him doing it is mesmerizing:
(via gizmodo)
Sorting Algorithms Visualized
This video visualization of 15 different sorting algorithms is mesmerizing. (Don’t forget the sound.)
An explanation of the process. You can play with several different kinds of sorts here.
Cheerleader does 44 backflips in 34 seconds
This video of Atlanta cheerleader Mikayla Clark breaking the world backflip record is mesmerizing. I did not know there was a world backflip record, but here is someone breaking it last year, too.
Yes, it is gymnastics day on kottke.org, what of it?
How the Tesla Model S is made
A nice video from Wired that shows how Tesla’s sedan is made.
Tesla got the factory for a song from Toyota in 2010, spent about a year or so setting up tooling and started producing the Model S sedan in mid-2012. The automaker brings in raw materials by the truckload, including the massive rolls of aluminum that are bent, pressed, and formed to create the car. Those lightweight components are assembled by swarm of red robots in an intricate ballet that is mesmerizing to behold.
(via ★interesting)
NYC People-Watching at 780 Frames Per Second
Filmed at 780 fps with a Phantom Flex from the back of a moving SUV, James Nares’ Street depicts people walking New York streets in super slow motion.
The film runs 60 minutes (depicting about three minutes of real time footage), Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore did the soundtrack, and it’s on display at The Met until the end of May.
How hot dogs are made again
The last Kottke.org post about how hot dogs are made was almost 4 years ago, and that video doesn’t event work anymore and I say Saturday is the day to learn stuff anyway.
Two things about this video:
1) The scene of hot dogs shooting out of the hot dog maker and into the pile of hot dogs is mesmerizing. Virtually every ‘How x is made’ video has a similarly awesome shot.
2) These dudes make almost 2.5 million hot dogs per shift, which… Well, there are far, far, far more hot dogs being made in this country everyday than any of us realize.
(via ★andre)
Gears and Other Mechanical Things
This is a 1930 short film from avant-garde filmmaker Ralph Steiner that shows dozens of gears and other machinery at work.
(thx, matthew)
Through Destruction, a Washing Machine Achieves Transcendence
You’ve seen one washing machine self-destruction video, you’ve seen them all, right? Maybe not. Back in August, I posted this short video of a washer destroying itself (with some help from a brick) but this longer video is mesmerizing and almost poignant at times.
At times, it seems as though the washer is attempting to turn into the Picasso version of itself, a Cubist sculpture manifesting itself over time. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Google Image Search recursion
This is mesmerizing: using Google Image Search and starting with a transparent image, this video cycles through each subsequent related image, over 2900 in all.
(via ★mattb)
Pendulum waves
Mesmerizing video of a series of pendulums moving in an out of sync with each other until at the end…well, I won’t spoil it.
(thx, john)
Chocolate face
Watch as a woman gets chocolate sauce poured all over her face for almost ten minutes.
I don’t know what to think of this one: mesmerizing? yucky? erotic? hunger-inducing? I have a hungry tingling disgust going on here…
Clapping music
Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin “perform” Steve Reich’s Clapping Music. This is mesmerizing.
(via @sippey)
Charlie Chaplin’s time traveller
Mesmerizing Zapruder-esque footage that seems to show a woman talking on a mobile phone at the 1928 premiere of a Charlie Chaplin film at Mann’s Chinese Theatre.
According to this guy, the simplest explanation is that the woman is a time traveller. Stick that in your Occam’s razor and shave it! (via geekologie)
The art of sitting
At the behest of MoMA, photographer Marco Anelli has been taking photographs of all the people participating in Marina Abramović’s performance in the main atrium of the museum and posting them to Flickr. To review:
Abramović is seated in [the atrium] for the duration of the exhibition, performing her new work The Artist Is Present for seven hours, five days a week, and ten hours on Fridays. Visitors are invited to sit silently with the artist for a duration of their choosing.
The photographs are mesmerizing…face after face of intense concentration. A few of the participants even appear to be crying (this person and this one too) and several show up multiple times (the fellow pictured above sat across from Abramović at least half-a-dozen times). The photos are annotated with the duration of each seating. Most stay only a few minutes but this woman sat there for six and a half hours. This woman sat almost as long as was also dressed as the artist. (It would be neat to see graphs of the durations, both per day and as a distribution.)
Has anyone out there sat across from Abramović? Care to share your experience? (via year in pictures)
Update: On the night of the opening exhibition, the third person to sit across from Abramović was her ex-boyfriend and collaborator of many years, Ulay (pictured here on Flickr). James Wescott reports on the scene:
When she looked up again, sitting opposite her was none other than Ulay. A rapturous silence descended on the atrium. Abramović immediately dissolved into tears, and for the first few seconds had trouble meeting Ulay’s calm gaze. She turned from superhero to little girl — smiling meekly; painfully vulnerable. When they did finally lock eyes, tears streaked down Abramović’s cheeks; after a few minutes, she violated the conditions of her own performance and reached across the table to take his hands. It was a moving reconciliation scene — as Abramović, of course, was well aware.
Here’s a description of one of the projects they did together in the 70s:
To create this “Death self,” the two performers devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other’s exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual’s ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.
Wescott also sat across from the artist:
I was immediately stunned. Not by the strength of her gaze, but the weakness of it. She offered a Mona Lisa half-smile and started to cry, but somehow this served to strengthen my gaze; I had to be the mountain.
Carolina Miranda sat down across from Abramović:
When I finally sat down before Abramovic, the bright lights blocked out the crowd, the hall’s boisterous chatter seemed to recede into the background, and time became elastic. (I have no idea how long I was there.)
Amir Baradaran turned the exhibition into a venue for a performance of his own…he even made Abramović laugh. Joe Holmes got a photo of the photographer in action. (thx, yasna & patrick)
Update: The look-alike who sat with Abramović all day did an interview with BOMBLog.
At certain times I thought that we were really in sync. Other times I didn’t. Other times I was totally hallucinating. She looked like a childhood friend I once had. Then she looked like a baby. […] I thought time was flying by. Then time stopped. I lost track of everything. No hunger. No itching. No pain. I couldn’t feel my hands.
Update: Author Colm Tóibín sat opposite Abramović recently (here he is on Flickr) and wrote about it for The New York Review of Books. (thx, andy)
Update: Singer Lou Reed sat. (thx, bob)
Update: Rufus Wainwright sat. And perhaps Sharon Stone? (via mefi)
Update: More first-hand accounts from the NY Times.
Update: And CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. (thx, ian)
Spin spin mesmerizing
From Cory Arcangel, two dancing display stands that spin at slightly different speeds. I actually watched the whole thing.
These sculptures are made from 2 over the counter ‘Dancing Stands’ (the tacky kinetic product display stands you can often see in down market stores) which have been modified to spin at slightly different speeds. When my modified stands are placed next to each other they go in and out of phase slowly.
A perpetual loop of seduction
The landing page for Natalie Daoust’s Tokyo Girls project (sorry no direct link because of Flash) presents you with a grid of 45 small animated photos of women performing stripteases.
It is kinda mesmerizing. NSFW. (via swissmiss)
Khaaan!
Artist Daniel Martinico took William Shatner’s finest moment as an actor and stretched it out into a 15-minute video.
You’ll notice the crowd gets quiet after the first few seconds. It draws you in, forces you to pay attention, even if it’s just staring at the back and forth eye tics on Shatner’s face for a minute at a time. “In that moment everyone responds to it,” Martinico says. There’s laughing at first, but then people get into the rhythm of it and study the various little muscles as they pull and twitch on Kirk’s face. “It’s a phenomenal range in just a few seconds.”
Here’s the first two minutes of the video.
It’s pretty mesmerizing, even small and at poor quality. (via greg)
Waves in slow motion
Absolutely gorgeous slow motion HD video of a large wave from under the water…you can clearly see the intricate and powerful architecture of the wave.
Nice surfing shot too…but the wave is mesmerizing.
Coloring without the lines
Brooke Inman’s Everything Color Circle is mesmerizing. As somebody with limited organizational skills, I find it mind-boggling that she was able to put this together. And to think that it could be destroyed in a nanosecond if a sugar-addled kindergartner armed with construction paper wandered into the room. (via design milk)
Evolving walking shapes
A mesmerizing video that shows computer generated geometric shapes that have evolved to walk in all sorts of crazy ways. The shapes are generated using the Darwin@Home software. Some of them resemble young children just learning to walk or crawl. The final “beast” is particularly elegant.
Watch politicians age
Video compilations of several months of photos of John McCain, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush. Completely mesmerizing, especially the Bush one. See also: Noah Kalina Everyday and Paris Hilton doesn’t change facial expressions on YTMND.
