sand fields vs.rice fields

Jim Denevan

via Daily Onigiri

Jim Denevan

via Daily Onigiri

Jim Denevan

from the Serpentine Dance to the modern Tiller Girls.

The creators of this beautiful hypnotic silent movie -the Lumière Brothers, were one of the earliest filmmakers in history. The Serpentine Dance is a video from 19th century, inspired by the dance of Loie Fuller, one of the pioneers of modern dance and stage lighting. The woman in this video is often mistaken for Loie Fuller but it is actually not Loie but some unknown dancer. The Lumière Brothers shot this video in black and white and then hand painted each frame to achieve the affect similar to Loie's live performances.

Loie Fuller

In her live performances, Loie danced in her long silk skirts using different sorts of lights projected onto her skirt creating that misty and magical atmosphere leaving the audience hypnotized and delighted.

Now fast forwarding to our time.
I recently saw a dance performed by 32 robots and I have to admit I had that same hypnotic feeling just as if I was watching people dancing.

"The Tiller Girls" is a project that explores if the actions of a human and a robot can be equally regarded as art performance. The man behind the concept is Louis-Philippe Demers ,a multidisciplinary artist with a list of impressive robotic works so far. This project was inspired by famous dance troupe of 1900s- the Tiller Girls whose performances were hypnotic for the audience because of their preciseness and synchronization.

The Tiller robots were built to have only minimal freedom of movement but yet they achieve a large variety of expressions and behaviors which makes the performance really breath taking. I loved the collision of art and science in this piece, I loved the music and the lighting , the whole viewing experience was truly magical so if you get the chance to see the Tiller Girls, don't miss it.

making music can be easy&fun.

http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix

ToneMatrix is a cute little music synthesizer that lets you create your own audio sequences. It was created by Andre Michelle and it's a 16x16 matrix with grey boxes which you can activate by clicking on them. As soon as you activate the box, it turns white. Each line of boxes has its own individual tone. The sounds will play from left to right based on your selection. You can play around and try to arrange the notes in a way that makes sense but the thing is that almost anything you compose with this little music toy will sound good.
And of course you can save your little masterpieces, so go and have fun !

Gulp.

After the world's smallest stop motion animation Dot , guys from Nokia and Aardman Animations teamed up once again and this time the result is the world's largest stop animation video called Gulp.
Gulp explores the life of a lone fisherman and his little fishing boat. It was shot by three Nokia N8 phones which were attached to the crane and lifted 36 meters above the ground at South Wales seaside.The impressive thing is that all the waves, the sea gulls and the clouds are actually giant sand drawings carved in the beach by sand artists. And just like with Dot, you need to see the "making of" to realize just how amazing this creation is.

All Is Not Lost

The band OK Go continues to make innovative videos ( here's the post about the previous one) and this time the guys teamed up with Google Japan and modern dance company Pilobolus. The experimental video for the track "All is not lost"  is intended to be viewed in Google Chrome. It uses pop-ups in a very unusual way .
In the beginning you see the video in a small pop up in the center of the screen and as the song progresses, screen splits into more and more pop-ups and more dancers are involved and everything looks complex and beautiful.
The video is also interactive because before the video starts to load, you can enter a message which dancers will form at the very end of the video and you are given a choice to save that message or share it with your friends.
Below you can check the regular film version but the real thing is at http://www.allisnotlo.st