This site is made possible by member support. ❤️
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
I know, I know. Too much Wes Anderson. Too much AI. But there is something in my brain, a chemical imbalance perhaps, and I can’t help but find this reimagining of the Lord of the Rings in Anderson’s signature style funny and charming. Sorry but not sorry.
As part of a project to reproduce all 36 of Hokusai’s views of Mount Fuji as 1-bit black & white pixel art, James Weiner drew Great Wave Off Kanagawa:
And he used an old Mac running System 7 to do it:
I usually use either my Quadra 700 or PowerBook 100, mostly because those are my reliable and easy to access computers (that run System 7, my favourite and most familiar OS of that era).
Software-wise I use Aldus SuperPaint 3.0, which is what my family had when I was a kid. Yes, I’d say that all of this is 99% nostalgia-driven…
This is just a lovely rendering — spare and elegant with just the right amount of detail.
No matter which side you come down on in the debate about using AI tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to create digital art, this video of an experienced digital artist explaining how he uses AI in his workflow is worth a watch. I thought this comment was particularly interesting:
I see the overall process as a joint effort with the AI. I’ve been a traditional artist for 2 decades, painting on canvas. And in the last five years I’ve been doing a lot of digital art. So from that part of myself, I don’t feel threatened at all.
I feel this is an opportunity. An opportunity for many new talented people to jump on a new branch of art that is completely different from the one that we have already in digital art and just open up new way of being creative.
It’s a no-brainer: what if you handed over a visually rich sci-fi universe with slightly campy origins to a quirky auteur with an overwhelming aesthetic, just to see what you’d get? This short trailer imagines Wes Anderson at the helm of his very own Star Wars movie, complete with Bill Murray as Obi-Wan and Owen Wilson as Darth Vader (wow).
See also, from back in 2012, Conan O’Brien’s take on Wes Anderson’s Star Wars, A Life Galactic. I would totally watch either of these movies tbh.
Leave it to the Auralnauts to take The Mandalorian’s solemn catchphrase “This is the way”, back it with a pulsing beat, and turn it into the banger of the summer. Ok, maybe not. But in the process, they counted 222 uses of the phrase over the three seasons of the show (and also during The Book of Boba Fett, I think).
Related: one hour of Zemo dancing from The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. (via neatorama)
Wow, I’d never seen these before today! For the 1999 MTV Movie Awards, Wes Anderson created three promo spots, each one a staged re-creation of a nominated movie in the style of the Hollywood-inspired plays in Rushmore (Serpico & the Vietnam War one). All three shorts (Armageddon, Out of Sight, The Truman Show) star Jason Schwartzman as Max Fisher, along with the rest of the Max Fischer Players. (via open culture)
Internet artist evbuilds creates these chunky pixelized abstract images in Microsoft Excel.
Excel is one of those rare pieces of software that is terrifically useful at what it’s designed to do but also powerful enough where you can make it do things that perhaps it really shouldn’t be doing. See also The Excel Spreadsheet Artist, Making Music in Excel, and Super Mario Bros Recreated in Excel.
Ok sorry everyone but kottke.org is a Larnell Lewis fan blog today. This morning, I featured a video of Lewis, a Grammy-winning musician and music professor, explaining the 13 levels of complexity of drumming. In response, a pair of readers sent me this video, in which Lewis hears Metallica’s Enter Sandman for the first time (!) and then largely succeeds in playing it after a single listen (!!). You may find yourself wanting to skip to the part where he starts playing, but it’s really fascinating to watch him encoding the music into his brain and body through a combination of active listening, moving his body to the drumbeat, and spatially mapping the music to his drum kit. (thx, robert & matthew)
I like these paintings by Spanish artist Lino Lago where traditional oil painted portraits peek through bright color fields. He calls them Fake Abstracts. (via colossal)
Back in 2020, the Smithsonian Institution placed 2.8 million high-resolution images and 3D models of objects in their collection into the public domain via their Open Access initiative. Over the past three years, that collection has grown to 4.5 million images, an absolutely immense trove of objects that people are free to use and remix however they wish.
That last image is the mailing wrapper from when jeweler Harry Winston sent the Hope Diamond (currently valued at $200-350 million) to the Smithsonian through the regular US Mail.
Mailed on the morning of November 8 from New York City, the item was sent by registered (first class) mail — considered the safest means of transport for valuables at that time. The total fee was $145.29 (see the meter machine tapes). Postage only amounted to $2.44 for the package which weighed 61 ounces. The remainder of the fee ($142.85) paid for an indemnity of about $1 million.
(via my modern met)
The folks at RuPublicans are having fun using AI to generate photorealistic imagery of prominent conservatives in drag. Here are Anita Filibust-Her McConnell, Claretta Corrupta, Rhonda Santy, serving looks:
From their Stories:
Oh honey, darlings, sugar pies! THANK YOU for following and sharing. Drag artists have brought me joy, laughter, helped heal old wounds, and given me permission to love myself — and I’m not the only one.
Now let’s get real kittens. Drag isn’t lip-syncing; it’s art, it’s heart, and oh honey, it’s protest. To those in power serving up false narratives like an overcooked wig at a drag brunch, listen up: we’re here, we’re queer, and we ain’t going anywhere.
(via @thoughtbrain)
For his project Study of Perspective, artist and activist Ai Weiwei took photos of himself flipping off “significant institutions, landmarks and monuments from around the world”, notably Tiananmen Square in 1995. Using this Google Street View-enabled web tool, you can use Ai’s middle finger to flip off anything you’d like, anywhere in the world.
I’ve included a few examples above from the site’s archive. In a brief review of what folks have done with the site recently, I observed several shots of the Kremlin, the Eiffel Tower, churches, and various Trump buildings, but I also saw the Stonewall Inn and other gay landmarks.
I totally love these “evolved” drawings of the elaborate patterns of broken plates by Robert Strati. The project was inspired by a plate that broke in the Strati household:
This work was inspired by a plate from my wife’s late mother, Barbara. One day it was dropped and shattered. Some time after, I picked up a pen and started working on the “Fragmented” series, exploring the possibilities of things broken and the stories that can evolve from them.
You can see more work from this project on Instagram and at this site.
See also Kintsukuroi and Martin Klimas’ Porcelain Figures. (via my modern met)
Oh man, this is a huge huge nostalgia bomb for me - a 50-minute medley of the most popular song from each month since January 1980. When I was a kid growing up in rural Wisconsin, there were basically four choices of music to listen to: country, metal, oldies, and pop/top 40. I chose pop, so the first ~15 minutes of this video is basically the soundtrack to my childhood.
Here’s a playlist of all the songs on Spotify, in case you want to listen to the whole megillah. See also The Hood Internet’s remixes of pop music by year. (via open culture)
Well this is some bizarre good fun — turns out that the campy goofiness of Star Wars and the campy seriousness of high fashion make for a pretty good combination.
See also Lord of the Rings by Balenciaga and Game of Thrones by Balenciaga. Oh, and Hipster Star Wars.
Kirby Ferguson has released the final and “definitive” full-length version of his fantastic Everything is a Remix video series (transcript).
Memes are remixing. You take a photo, you repurpose it, then someone else tries it, then there’s a flood of everyone trying out combinations, including remixing other memes.
When you take something old and use it in something new, that’s remixing. It might just seem like just copying, but it’s actually something much more. Remixing can empower you be more creative.
Remixing allows us to make music without playing instruments, to create software without coding, to create bigger and more complex ideas out of smaller and simpler ideas.
You don’t need expensive tools to remix, you don’t need a distributor, you don’t even need skills or… good judgment. Everybody can remix and everybody does.
From our songs and games and movies and memes, to how we train computers to create, to the way we sense of reality, to the evolution of life itself, everything is definitely a remix.
(via matt haughey)
I’d seen Titanic with a Cat but hadn’t realized there were a whole collection of videos featuring OwlKitty cleverly edited into them. I really like the Jurassic Park one embedded above. The licking! The purring! Fantastic, no notes.
You can check out a bunch of other movies featuring OwlKitty on YouTube (LOTR, Top Gun, Home Alone, John Wick, Mandalorian), including some behind-the-scenes of how they’re made. Here’s how they did the Jurassic Park one:
The power of at-home filmmaking software and equipment is just incredible.
Lego bricks and Impressionism are a natural pairing, and so Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has recreated Claude Monet’s massive Water Lilies triptych with 650,000 Lego bricks. Spanning nearly 50 feet across, the Lego sculpture is part of Ai’s upcoming show at the Design Museum in London. Here is a tantalizing behind-the-scenes view.
Ai has been creating Lego works for years now — including these Warhol-esque portraits and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — and was even denied from buying bricks from the company at one point.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, director of the 2001 romantic comedy The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain, has recut his beloved movie into a cheeky short film that reveals that Amélie was actually a KGB spy.
Did no one ever wonder how a young waitress afforded such sophisticated decoration for a flat in Montmartre, one of Paris’s most expensive districts?
Film editors are magicians. (via @pacanukeha)
I spent more than a few minutes scrolling through Dana Sibera’s Mastodon feed (also on Twitter) featuring her imagined oddball tech items. Like this marble Mac:
A NeXT laptop? A NeXT laptop!
A foldable Powerbook:
And a widescreen Apple Lisa:
I found out about Sibera’s work via Marcin Wichary’s Shift Happens newsletter — you can find more examples of her work there, on Mastodon, or on Twitter.
Tchiks is a luthier from Belgium who, after his daughter outgrew her crib, turned it and a bunch of other Ikea products into a guitar.
The guitar started out as a joke. I remember going upstairs and telling my wife “I’m gonna make a guitar out of Zoé’s old bed”. She rolled her eyes to the ceiling and asked me “why”. Then I immediately thought “This is the way”.
It sounds good! Like any good craftspeople, luthiers can get a little fussy about their materials and the specs list for the Ikea guitar at the end of the video pokes some gentle fun at that:
Body: baby crib, chair, shelf
Neck: baby crib
Fretboard: photo ledge
Knob: chopping board
(via linkfest)
In this final installment of Everything is a Remix, Kirby Ferguson offers his perspective on image generation with AI, how it compares to human creativity, and what its role will be in the future. In watching the part about the anxiety in the creative community about these image generators, I was reminded of what Ted Chiang has said about fears of technology actually being fears of capitalism.
It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us.
I agree with Ferguson that these AI image generators are, outside the capitalist context, useful and good for helping humans be creative and express themselves. Tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion allow anyone to collaborate with every previous human artist that has ever existed, all at once. Like, just think about how powerful this is: normal people who have ideas but lack technical skills can now create imagery. Is it art? Perhaps not in most cases, but some of it will be. If the goal is to get more people to be able to more easily express and exercise their creativity, these image generators fulfill that in a big way. But that’s really scary — power always is.
The Mauritshuis museum has loaned out Girl With a Pearl Earring to the Rijksmuseum for its blockbuster, once-in-a-lifetime Johannes Vermeer exhibition. While she’s out of the building, they’re digitally displaying dozens of renditions of the artwork submitted during an open call for entries last year. If you can’t make it to the museum in person (*sigh*), they’re showcasing some of the entries on Instagram and you can see what the in-person display looks like in this video.
Regular readers might remember that I have something of a thing for Girl/Pearl remixes. Here are just a few from the archives: Corn with a Pearl Earring, Girl with the Grande Iced Latte, Rihanna with a Pearl Earring, Girl with a Schmeared Earring, at the beach with Mona & Vincent, Girl with a Pearl Earring and Point-and-Shoot Camera, and Lego Girl with a Pearl Earring. (via colossal)
Watch as Polish dance troupe Fair Play Crew brings the twitchy movements from old school martial arts video games into the real world with a funny and perfectly choreographed routine (it starts at the 3:50 mark in the video above. It seems like they’re riffing on a few different games here — Karate on the Atari 2600, Black Belt, Karate Champ, Karateka, International Karate, and even a little Mortal Kombat — instead of just a single game.
From comments made by Knives Out and Glass Onion director Rian Johnson, it doesn’t seem likely that a Benoit Blanc mystery movie with the Muppets or a Muppet movie with Benoit Blanc will ever happen. So, we’ll have to settle for this mashup of Blanc and The Great Muppet Caper made by Nerdist:
I dunno Johnson, that works pretty well…
From YouTuber poakwoods, a pair of criss-cross mashups of Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but with their directors switched. When George Lucas takes the helm of 2001, you get a more crowd-pleasing and freewheeling movie while Stanley Kubrick’s Star Wars becomes more balletic and contemplative. Both are pitch-perfect.
See also Wes Anderson’s Star Wars. (via daringfireball)
If you’ve ever wondered what HBO and the producers of The Last of Us might do with some slightly different source material, Pedro Pascal and the cast of Saturday Night Live took a crack at a gritty adaptation of Mario Kart. I mean, I would 100% watch this.
Photoshop wizard Ingo Lindmeier makes these delightful mashups of animals and objects (fruits, vegetables, technology) which you can find on his Instagram account. Some of them are a little over-the-top, but the conceptually simpler ones are great. (via moss and fog)
At the end of each year, art director Chris Barker collects celebrities who have died in the past 12 months into a Sgt. Pepper’s album cover collage — here’s 2022’s edition.
There doesn’t appear to be a complete listing of everyone pictured, but you can easily pick out Coolio, Gilbert Gottfried, Sidney Poitier, Angela Lansbury, Meatloaf, Nichelle Nichols, Pele, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Twitter.
Fueled by television, advertising, cable TV, and the internet, the post-war era saw an explosion of celebrity in America and the world. The average person today “knows of” so many more people than someone living in 1945 did, probably by a couple orders of magnitude. As Boomers and Gen X continue to age, annual displays like this of well-known people who have died will get larger and larger.
Update: An incomplete key to the image is available here. (via @matsimpsk)
This is such a trip to see the familiar original version of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda being played as a VR first-person shooter. You only get one screen at a time with the top-down 2D view, but in this version, you get as much of the map as you can see - it looks like it stretches off into the distance for miles.
I just went to Wikipedia to look at the release date for Zelda and it came out February 21, 1986. I remember getting Zelda for my birthday that year, which means I somehow waited seven whole months to play that game and, boy was it worth it. I have a Switch now and still fire up the original Zelda sometimes, just to make sure the ol’ reflexes still work. (via digg)
Stay Connected