kottke.org posts about video
Artist and composer Matthew Wilcock looks for patterns in the everyday and creates music from them. It’s easier to quickly watch an example than to explain:
Instantly thought of the video for Star Guitar by The Chemical Brothers, directed by Michel Gondry. They also seem like the sort of videos you would have found on Mister Rodgers’ or Sesame Street back in the day.
In addition to traffic, Wilcock has made music with people on escalators:
Each escalator and path is assigned three notes and they alternate between those as the person’s head breaks the line. Lowest note closest to camera, highest furtherest away. I love the idea of involving all these people unknowingly in an artwork. Recorded in Liverpool St. station, London.
And a bird eating:
Factory workers:
Bees:
You can find more of these video compositions on Wilcock’s YouTube channel and Instagram. He’s most active (and popular) on Insta; check out his Tour de France and swingset videos there. (thx, andy)
Steve Mould is always informative and entertaining, so I started watching his video on building the world’s tallest siphon, nodding along to what I thought was the reasonable conclusion. And then the video kicked into another gear — because with science, the simple solution is not always the whole story when extreme conditions are in play. (via the kid should see this)
In the most recent episode of Howtown, Joss Fong explains how above-ground nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s left a signature in all life on Earth that can be used as a forensic tool for catching art forgers, shady ivory dealers, and even fraudulent wine sellers/cellars.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union (with contributions from the UK and France) conducted a series of above-ground nuclear tests that led to an increase in the radioactive carbon-14 concentration in the atmosphere. This global surge, known as the “bomb pulse” or the “bomb spike”, is one of the most distinctive chemical signatures of the Cold War. The radiocarbon spread worldwide, embedding into plants, animals, and humans.
Scientists later discovered that this bomb-pulse radiocarbon spike could be used as a precise dating tool. Bomb-pulse dating allows researchers to determine whether biological material formed before or after nuclear testing. This method has been applied to forensic science, medical research, and environmental monitoring. It has been used to identify forgeries in artwork, measure human cell turnover, and estimate the lifespan of Greenland sharks.
One of the most important applications has been in tracking the illegal ivory trade. Elephant tusks absorb atmospheric carbon while the animal is alive. By analyzing the carbon-14 content of ivory artifacts or raw ivory, investigators can determine whether the material comes from a legally antique source or from a recently killed elephant.
This intersection of nuclear history, atmospheric science, and conservation biology demonstrates how Cold War nuclear fallout became a forensic tool for fighting elephant poaching and wildlife trafficking. More broadly, it demonstrates the creativity and resourcefulness of scientific researchers, who find ingenious uses for datasets of unlikely origin.
Even after reading a couple of reviews and watching the trailer, it’s difficult to understand what the Austrian film Little, Big, and Far is actually about. So here’s the official synopsis:
Austrian astronomer Karl is at a crossroads in his life and work. He finds his physicist wife growing distant and his job being reshaped by environmental crises as thoughts about science, fascism, and his grandson’s future spin above his head. After attending a conference in Greece, Karl decides not to return home and heads for a small island in hopes of finding a dark enough sky to reconnect with the stars. Abandoned at a remote mountain trail, he ascends and waits for darkness to fall.
Disney dropped the trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu today, a feature-length film that will debut in theaters in May 2026. As this Star Wars Explained breakdown, er, explains, that the trailer was going to come out earlier but:
Word on the street is that it was supposed to come out this past Friday, but Disney was and is in the middle of some hot water. Acting like cowards in the face of authoritarianism will do that, especially when one of the franchises you own {shows footage of Andor} is about the exact opposite.
Last week, Disney made the decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel Live from the schedule because of threats from the Trump regime, prompting protests. Kimmel returns to the air tomorrow night:
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” the company said in a statement. “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
Super Mario Bros. Remastered is an open source, fan-created, remastered version of the original Super Mario Bros. The trailer is above.
The game includes new levels, custom modes and characters, a custom level editor, and more. You need the SMB1 NES ROM to play it — “none of the original assets are contained in the source code, unless it was originally made by us!”
You can download versions for Windows, Linux, and MacOS…check out all the options and details on Github.
A short documentary with the recorded sounds of a melting glacier.
When you look at this gigantic mass of ice, it’s hard to get a personal relationship to it. So we wanted to document this landscape to give us an idea of what it sounds like inside a glacier. There is also the sadness because you know that all these sounds are disappearing right now. Of course, melting is something natural for glaciers, but the problem is that nothing new is coming back.
Christian Marclay debuted his 24-hour film The Clock 15 years ago. The film is made up of thousands of clips from movies and TV shows that show timepieces or otherwise make reference to the time of day. I’ve seen chunks of it in a few museums & galleries and it’s wonderful.
Using this extraordinary minute-by-minute timeline of nearly all the scenes that make up The Clock, one person is attempting to reverse engineer the entire film. It’s not The Clock, but it’s A Clock. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Says the creator:
So, when I stumbled upon this Fandom Wiki, where the mysterious user ElevenFiftyNine had seemingly started the task of listing all the movies in The Clock, I couldn’t help myself; I started remaking the whole thing from scratch.
So, since I can’t really say this is The Clock, it is my best attempt at making a Clock, by following the excellent effort by ElevenFiftyNine.
A ten-minute excerpt is free on the website but you need to join the Patreon to watch the entire work-in-progress. According to their most recent update, the film is finished but the final version isn’t online quite yet; October 15th is the release date.
BTW, here’s the creator’s definition of “finished”:
I spoke some months ago about what 100% means for this project, and it is not that it is a fully perfect copy of Marclay’s work. The information available online is incomplete, and new information might appear in the future. For now, 100% means that all available information, is in a Clock.
And incredibly, they have never actually seen The Clock in person:
Unfortunately I have never had a chance to see The Clock, as it is only visible when exhibited at a museum. This is increasingly a rare occurrence, and even then, apparently the queues when it is on show, are monstrous. Never mind that it might be anywhere in the world!
Aside from the clips, I haven’t watched any of this yet, but it is a very tempting alternative to waiting for a rare showing somewhere I happen to be.
From the Weird History YouTube channel, an epic undertaking: telling the (US-centric) cultural history of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s in just (just!) 16 hours.
This is like a mega ultra monster extended mix of We Didn’t Start the Fire. The videos are organized chronologically, with each year taking 15-30 minutes to summarize, so you can watch small bits here and there instead of having to ingest a whole decade in one go.
This is not some AI-generated to-study-to jazz video; it’s a guy who really likes jazz playing a bunch of records from his extensive collection.
over the years i’ve built a small but reallllly incredible and meaningful record collection, spanning from jazz, classical, a great folk collection from my dad, hip hop, house music, and random other things. record stores have been a sort of library for me, a place where i can find artifacts. there in sooo much real living history in a record.
most of vinyls i’ve collected are originals too and it’s just such a cool experience. for so many of the records i have they were originally recorded in a studio or live, mixed on a mixing console and put onto tape. then from the tape recording the vibrations were etched into the wax of the vinyl. how cool is that?
there’s a certain sense of bringing back to life i feel when i put a record on, these preserved etches of a song reawakening. it’s really beautiful.
i had an absolutely balll making this and i cant wait to make many more. i truly hope you find some songs that you love in here, so many of these are real favorites of mine.
If you enjoyed that, you might like this other YouTube channel that I posted about recently. (via undermanager)
Direcciones is a short documentary about how giving directions works in Costa Rica, where “a centralized system for street addresses does not exist”. Instead, people use landmarks as reference points when giving directions. Here’s a postal worker talking about how some senders use outdated location markers to send letters:
Pretty bad, addresses here are pretty bad. For example, there is a letter I get, like, once a month. It says, “From the old Cristal Hotel…” and then some other reference points. So, yeah, it’s hard because people don’t update the addresses, they just write “from the old…” and it stays “from the old…” The Cristal Hotel had already closed when I was born.
However, for many residents there’s a kind of poetry in this old style of wayfinding. A lovely and thoughtful short film.
The Hive Architect is a short documentary about honey bee conservationist Matt Somerville and the log hives he builds to house wild bees.
There is a widely held theory that our British honey bee couldn’t exist without being domesticated by beekeepers. However, for bee conservationists like Matt Somerville, this theory is ludicrous.
He has spent decades admiring free-living honey bees nesting in tree cavities and they are under increasing threats from commercial beekeeping, loss of habitat and other violences of the modern world.
So Matt decided to do something about it. For the last 14 years he has spent the winters creating his log hives before driving around all of England in the summer, erecting them as minimal intervention homes for wild honey bees.
Four years ago, Beau Miles planted 1440 trees in 24 hours. Recently, he went back to see how they were doing; those trees are a bonafide forest now.
In 2021 I planted a tree a minute, for 24 hours, on my mates farm. It was freakin hard work, but also one of the coolest, most rewarding days I’ve ever had. I made a film about the project and promised folks I’d return every two years to show off the plot and see how the trees and bushes are going. This was a special day because I really felt like the project had landed. I had a cup of tea in the new forest, from water boiled on a fire made from the forest itself. It’s perhaps the most profound cup of tea I’ve ever had.
Confession: I spent half of this video concerned that Miles had actually cut down one of the trees to build his tea-making fire, but I needn’t have worried: he used the old planting stakes and trees that didn’t grow.
Miles recently made another video about planting trees and the number of views that video got in a month would dictate how many trees he would plant for the next bit of forest.
Here’s a short video by Arthur Brooks (that you are probably watching on your phone) about why you should log off, put your phone down, and let yourself be bored.
You need to be bored. You will have less meaning and you will be more depressed if you never are bored. I mean, it couldn’t be clearer.
See also In Praise of Boredom, In Defense of Boredom, and “Boredom: the great engine of creativity”.
I haven’t watched it yet, but I have seen so many recommendations for this gonzo birdwatching documentary called Listers over the past few days that I wanted to share it with you.
Two brothers travel across the United States in a used minivan on a mission to find as many bird species as they can in a single year.
Yeah, not your typical birdwatching fare…the vibe of the brothers’ quest is more like a surf or skate video. Here’s the trailer:
And the whole 2-hour movie is available on YouTube as well:
I’ve hoping to make some time to watch it this weekend; it looks great. The two brothers have also released a companion book, Field Guide of All the Birds We Found One Year in the United States.
Gabriel Bonnin, aka Singer Sound System, plays an electro-acoustic hurdy-gurdy that’s driven by an old Singer sewing machine pedal.
My instrument is an electro-acoustic hurdy-gurdy. I just removed the crank and use a Singer machine to drive it :-) It is equipped with four integrated microphones that allow me to process the sound live, especially in Ableton Live.
Some of his most popular recent covers include the Doctor Who theme1:
Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train:
The X-Files theme:
And Enter Sandman by Metallica:
Oh and Daft Punk!
You can find his stuff on YouTube and Instagram.
The trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out movie; looks like another great prestige caper.
Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) returns for his most dangerous case yet in the third and darkest chapter of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery opus. Starring Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church.
It’s coming out in “select theaters” on Nov 26 before its debut on Netflix Dec 12.
Watch a man named Ozzie make rope using a very simple hand-cranked machine. The real magic happens starting at about the 12-minute mark, where the three strands of the rope come together — my mouth actually fell open at this point. It’s amazing what you can do with just a simple machine that cleverly leverages the laws of physics and the material’s own properties.
You can order one of these rope making machines from Etsy.
See also How Rope Was Made the Old Fashioned Way, i.e. how rope was made in Edwardian England. (via book of joe)
Whoa, I have not watched this documentary in a loooong time — very interesting to watch in the future this company helped to create, for good and very, very bad.
Code Rush is a documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape’s last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31 1998, and the impact on the engineers’ lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.
Interviews in the movie include Ellen Ullman, Kara Swisher, Jamie Zawinski, Jim Barksdale, Marc Andreessen, and Brendan Eich. (via robin sloan)
This is the trailer for a documentary celebrating the life and work of actor & comedian John Candy.
I loved John Candy; how could you not? Uncle Buck was my favorite of his movies. I can’t believe he died more than 20 years ago already. (via craig mod)
In 1987, choir director Dennis Bell arranged a version of U2’s #1 hit I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For for his choir, the New Voices of Freedom. After hearing a recording of the arrangement, U2 asked Bell & the choir to join the band for an upcoming show at Madison Square Garden in NYC. Before the show, the band and the choir rehearsed together at Greater Calvary Baptist Church in Harlem:
Here is some behind-the-scenes footage of the rehearsal (more); Bono’s arm is in a sling for some reason?
The live recording of the song from that MSG show appeared on their next album, Rattle and Hum; here’s the (music-only) video from U2’s YouTube channel:
And here’s an actual video of the MSG performance (taken from the Rattle and Hum DVD):
You can also find the MSG version of the song (and the rest of Rattle and Hum) on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
Bell and the New Voices of Freedom recorded their own version of the song, which you can listen to on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
P.S. That same day, the band walked around Harlem and stumbled across street musicians Satan & Adam; a clip of their song made it onto the album and DVD.
(via laura olin)
I ran across this delightful account that explores and explains everyday scientific questions through maddeningly catchy songs. Like why a cast saw cuts through plaster but spares your skin:
How working principle of an electric kettle is another banger:
My gateway into this account was why are steel coils placed upright when trucks are hauling them:
These will get stuck in your head. Available on YouTube and TikTok (e.g. how is a football made).
For her newest film, director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) has adapted Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet; both book and movie are about William Shakespeare and his wife in the aftermath of the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Paul Mescal stars as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes. Here’s the trailer.
The film recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and the reviews are very good.
Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of a November theatrical release, Hamnet is devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years. The book was overwhelming, too, and going into a film about the death of a child, one naturally prepares to shed some tears. Still, I did not really expect to cry this much. That’s not just because of the tragic weight of the material, but because the picture reimagines the poetic act of creating Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play sits on the highest shelf, fixed by the dust from centuries of acclaim. It is about as unimpeachable as a work of art can be. And yet, here is a movie that dares to explore its inception. The attempt itself is noble, and maybe a little brazen; that it succeeds feels downright supernatural.
The film premieres in the US on Nov 27 with a nationwide release on Dec 12.
I didn’t know this about eels:
No one has ever seen an eel reproduce naturally. Not in the wild, not in captivity, not even once. And yet, eels are everywhere. In rivers, in lakes, in oceans, slippery, ancient, and inexplicably present.
For centuries, the world’s greatest thinkers tried to solve the mystery of the eel. Aristotle thought they emerged from mud. Others believe they simply appeared, formed by sunlight and dew. Even today, there’s only one place on Earth where we think all eels are born: somewhere deep in the Atlantic where mysteriously no adult eel has ever been found.
So why are eels like this? What evolutionary advantage lies in such an impossibly complex journey? And why does their life cycle still defy so much of what we know about biology? This isn’t just a story about a fish. It’s a story about a creature that breaks the rules of science.
I found this via Frank Chimero’s short essay on eels.
Now showing at the Brooklyn Museum (through April 2026) and the ICA in Boston (until Spet 1, 2025) is Christian Marclay’s Doors. Like his masterpiece The Clock, Doors is a film montage, this time of people in movies opening and closing doors.
In Doors (2022), Marclay stitches together hundreds of short film clips featuring the opening and closing of doors. More than a decade in the making, the moving image collage draws from nearly all genres of narrative cinema ranging from French New Wave to Hollywood blockbusters. Carefully edited by Marclay, the visual narrative follows actors entering new spaces, with each door marking an editing point and transitioning between films and soundscapes. The work suggests a labyrinthine journey where protagonists get lost and found again. Marclay describes the video as sculptural – a “mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in.”
The film is 54 minutes long but runs in a continuous loop. These videos feature some footage from the film; this one shows five minutes and this one four minutes:
Here’s Marclay on the process of making the video:
It’s quite difficult to find scenes in cinema showing an actor entering a space and then going into another space. I needed two doors: The actor enters one space and then leaves through another door — so it’s one room to the next room to the next room to the next room, and every time a different actor in a different film. It’s a strange choreography to edit. The door has to be opened in a similar way and at the same speed to make it believable. If someone is running and then you see them peek slowly through the door on the other side, it doesn’t look realistic. I also had to match the motion of pulling or pushing the door. To make things even more complicated, that door is hinged on one side and that has to match, the hinge and the door handle. If done well, the viewer gets sucked in and fooled by these editing tricks. So you see an actor in color in the ’80s entering a black-and-white film from the ’50s, and you know it’s not the same actor, but your mind wants to believe that it is. The trick is to create a flow, an illusion of continuity.
Doors brings to mind Christopher Nolan’s Inception (“a mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in”) and the doorway effect (“The doorway effect or location updating effect is a replicable psychological phenomenon characterized by short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another.”)
P.S. The Clock is showing at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, starting at the end of November and running through Jan 18, 2026.
The other day I was surprised to learn that several years ago, FC Barcelona streamed the entire match of their Nov 2010 5-0 dismantling of Real Madrid to YouTube and you can still watch it in its entirety.
The El Clásico match was notable not only for how much Barça dominated the game1 but also for who played (Messi, Iniesta, Xavi, Puyol, Busquets, Abidal, Villa, Valdés for FCB; Ronaldo, Di Maria, Benzema, Özil, Xabi Alonso, Sergio Ramos, Casillas for RM) and coached (Pep Guardiola for FCB and José Mourinho for RM).
I remember watching this game. Messi didn’t score because the Madrid defense was trying to put him in the hospital but he assisted on two goals and famously walked off the pitch near the end of the match, right past Cristiano Ronaldo, looking at the scoreboard and grinning.
The teams met four more times that year, in just a span of 18 days: a 1-1 La Liga draw, a 1-0 Real Madrid victory in the Copa del Ray final, and a pair of matches in the Champions League semis that ended with an aggregate score of 3-1 in favor of Barça, who went on to a dominating 3-1 win against Man United in the final. That 2010-2011 Barcelona club is considered one of the best club teams of all time.
Polymatt decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did.
I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one of these things open and taken a look inside, but it’s actually a little bit more complex than I expected. Recreating a shell isn’t going to be the tough part. It’s actually this: recreating the media itself with some PET film and a bunch of chemicals. These disks are incredibly thin, and the magnetic film itself is measured in microns. It’s going to be quite the feat in order to figure out how to apply something that thin.
Fantastic. If you enjoyed the Building a Watch From Scratch in a Brooklyn Basement video, you will probably like this one:
Wanting to get the most out of my new machine, I wanted to look into purchasing what’s called a drag knife. It’s a tool that would go in where the bit is that would allow you to create very precise cuts on things like paper or film. And after realizing I’d have to pay over $150 for one of these things, I thought, maybe I could make one. So that’s what I did. For me, one of the most satisfying things is using a machine to make more tools or features for that machine.
I’m not saying I want to buy myself a CNC machine, but I’m not not saying it either. (via @ernie.tedium.co)
As an occasional yoyo-er, I’ve watched a fair amount of yoyo routines, but this championship-winning routine by 8-time world champ Hajime Miura is the best one I’ve ever seen. Miura’s routine falls somewhere on the spectrum between magical illusion & performance art; even the music is perfect. The result is mesmerizing. (via the kid should see this)
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. 😵💫)
Giles Clement tends to go a little overboard with his hobbies. During the pandemic, he taught himself to repair old watches and then decided to try building one himself. Taylor Scott Mason made a short documentary about Clement and his effort to build a watch from scratch in his basement:
Aside from the movement, Clement builds every component of his watches completely from scratch. He even constructed two of his milling machines and designed the typeface for the numbers on the watch face.
My shop is built around two 3 axis CNC machines which I built from scrap steel, surplus parts and a bunch of cussin. The larger of the two has an epoxy granite frame which gives a sturdy platform for cutting titanium and stainless cases, case backs and crowns. The smaller machine sports a 100k RPM spindle and the ability to cut extremely fine details needed for the hands and dials.
I’ve also built a pad printing machine for dials a polishing lathe, a lume injector for hand and dial applications and several drawers full of jigs and fixtures needed to manufacture parts.
You can read more about Clement’s process on his website and buy one of his watches from his online shop. Prices start at $2250.
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