Wow! This is pretty crazy, unexpected and a wee bit creepy. Watch. 

At this weekend London Electronic Festival (LED) Aphex Twin used live facial recognition to map the audience and overlay images of his own, trademark distorted face. Mesmerising and disturbing in equal measure!

(via Nerdcore)

 
PR2 the robot is having fun with his happy socks.

 
Noah Scalin, known for creating a skull a day over the course of a year, recently created a massive one made of human brain slices for Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum.

Noah describes working with the museum’s curator and the process of creating his fascinating work of art:

Anna, the curator, asked if I could make a new skull for an upcoming project of theirs and of course I said yes, and then suggested that I make it in the museum itself. Since most of the items on display are very fragile I figured I’d be working with display jars or other non-historical materials. However, to my delight they had just acquired a collection of hundreds of beautiful real brain slices encased in acrylic (which had been dubbed “Zombie MRE’s”)! Since they’re very sturdy I was allowed to used them as my material and I was set up in a lovely room that holds the card catalog for their library. Over the course of two days I arranged the slices on two large old library tables and climbed a ladder over and over making sure the image looked right from a single vantage point (where I would eventually take my picture). All told I used 375 slices and a bit of fabric for the eye/nose holes…

As someone who has a thing for craniums and mandibles, I find this pretty damn exciting.

You can purchase Noah’s book ‘Skulls’ here.
 

 
Interview with Noah Scalin after the jump…

 
Sure, everyone loves a good ultra time-stretched pop tune. All the kids are doing it. Now you can make your own! I’m fairly sure that it’ll come out sounding the same regardless of what you feed into it, but I had fun playing with the OSX version.
 

 
The one that started it all after the jump…

 
Missouri-based design group MK12 have replicated the look and sound of educational/industrial films of the 1960’s in the beautifully constructed Telephoneme. MK12 was partly inspired by the Bell Science Laboratory series of short films we used to have to watch in elementary school. They’ve just added some LSD to the mix.

Telephoneme takes visual cues from The Alphabet Conspiracy as well as other educational films of days past, inspired by the awkward editing & absurd premises that so often defined the genre. The color palette is simple and deliberate, and we also developed a technique in which all the elements were split out into their respective red, green, and and blue channels(similar to how a printer makes several passes of pure color to construct a realistic image). These channels mostly remain superimposed throughout the film, but they sometimes move independently of one another, creating interesting transitional & graphic effects.

After the jump, you can watch a short clip from The Alphabet Conspiracy and see where MK12 got some of their inspiration for Telephoneme.
 

 
Watch The Alphabet Conspiracy…

 
Duncan Dowling has come up with some stylish concepts for redesigning American dollars. The vertical layout makes the money easier to handle because that’s the way paper currency is exchanged between people and machines.
You can read more about the project at Dowling’s website.

We have submitted a design concept to a competition being run by New York designer Richard Smith. The Dollar ReDe$ign Project hopes to bring about change for everyone. We want to rebrand the US Dollar, rebuild financial confidence and revive our failing economy.

 
More bucks after the jump…

 
Très freaky! Not recommended for the squeamish.
 
(via Street Anatomy)

 
Here’s a fun space helmet collage. Now, can you name all the famous faces? 
 
(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

 
Japanese robot mouth provides the narration for a rubber baby maker.

A product of Plasticity
A product of Plasticity
Plastic people, plastic people
You are your foot, your hair
Your nose, your arms
You suck, you love, you are
Your being is you’re plastic
Blah, blah, blah, blah
Plastic peoples - Zappa

 
Technology in your face! BAAAAAM!
 
(via Dooby Brain)

 
Using printed cardboard, two turntables, a projector and screen, Austrian student Clemens Kogler created this very groovy concept employing a modern take on the phenakistoscope technique which he calls phonovideo. With one exception, all of the animated paintings are based on album covers. The music for “Stuck in a Groove” was created by Richard Eigner.

The graphic illustrates how the process works. For a more detailed description check out the interview with Kogler at motiongrapher.

Kogler imagines deejays using phonovideo in performance.

Phonovideo is a VJ tool or visual instrument used to display animations in an analog way without the help of a computer. “Stuck in a Groove” is the first film made with this technique, it serves also as a demo for the technique .
In the future phonovideo could be used for live performances in cooperation with musicians, performers and other artists.

 
François Vautier says, “I installed an ant colony inside my scanner five years ago. I scanned the nest each week.”
 
Wow! This is pretty amazing stuff!
 
(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

 
“But I might point out that I had one beer before I did that.”

 
By the time Montreal-born filmmaker Arthur Lipsett made his nine-and-a-half-minute long dystopian short 21-87 in 1963, he was well-aware of the power of abstract collage film. His short from two years earlier, Very Nice, Very Nice was a dizzying flood of black & white images accompanied by bits of audio he’d collected from the trash cans of the National Film Board while he was working there. And wildly enough, it got nominated for a Best Short Subject Oscar in 1962.

But with 21-87, the then-27-year-old Lipsett was not only using moving images, he was also refining his use of sound. And it got the attention of the young USC film student George Lucas, who’d fallen in love with abstract film while going to Canyon Cinema events in the San Francisco Bay area. 21-87’s random and unsettling visions of humans in a mechanistic society accompanied by bits of strangely therapeutic or metaphysical dialogue, freaky old-time music, and weird sound effects, affected Lucas profoundly, according to Steve Silberman in Wired magazine:

’When George saw 21-87, a lightbulb went off,’ says Walter Murch, who created the densely layered soundscapes in [Lucas’s 1967 student short] THX 1138 and collaborated with Lucas on American Graffiti. ‘One of the things we clearly wanted to do in THX-1138 was to make a film where the sound and the pictures were free-floating. Occasionally, they would link up in a literal way, but there would also be long sections where the two of them would wander off, and it would stretch the audience’s mind to try to figure out the connection.’

Famously, Lucas would later use 21-87 as the number Princess Leia’s cell in Star Wars. But although his success allowed him freedom at the NFB, Lipsett’s psychological problems would lead him to commit suicide in 1986, two weeks before he turned 50.
 

 
After the jump, compare with Lucas’s equally bewildering short Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138 4EB!
 

 
Hypnotic animation—this is an ad, really, but it’s a soft sell—to get people interested to read the Newseek special report on The Beauty Advantage (which is quite interesting). There’s a fairly amusing punchline, but I won’t spoil it for you.

 
Marshall McLuhan would have turned 99 years old today, and his status as the god-daddy of media studies still seems pretty rock-solid. I wasn’t previously aware of how often the Canadian theorist appeared on TV, and was especially unaware of his November 1967 duet with New York novelist Norman Mailer on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show The Summer Way, bravely moderated by Ken Lefolii.

Recovered from recent treatment for a benign brain tumor he suffered while teaching in New York, McLuhan gamely tugs at a few of Mailer’s pretensions. Mailer is recently back from levitating the Pentagon with the Yippies, with the siege of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention in his future.

McLuhan pops off a bunch of gems, including:

The planet is no longer nature, it’s now the content of an artwork.
…
Nature has ceased to exist…it needs to be programmed.
…
The environment is not visible, it’s information—it’s electronic.
…
The present is only faced by any generation by the artist.

Communications maven Michael Hinton goes speculative on his hero’s televised meeting with the Jersey-raised boxer-novelist, but of course it’s best to just check the thing out yourself.
 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
When I was a kid in the 1970s, I took the Torrance test three times, so I am well-acquainted with what it is and probably many of you reading this are as well. The idea that Torrance test scores, which measure ingenuity, problem solving and creativity, have fallen, dramatically, has very poor implications for the planet. Are we raising a generation of spectators with short attention spans, more interested in downloading Internet porn and playing video games than the arts and sciences? There’s been a lot of discussion in the culture of late, about older folks having a dim view of the “entitled” or “bratty” attitude of many of today’s twenty-somethings. Whether you buy into that or not (I can’t decide personally if this is an accurate perception/legitimate observation, but anecdotally speaking… well, maybe it is) this seems to indicate that a trend towards something not altogether positive might be accelerating, and that an evolutionary epigenetic change might be in the works. Not a good one.

High IQ parents, it’s up to you!

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

Read the entire article:
The Creativity Crisis: For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it. (Newsweek)

 
“We expect to be back in about 1 million years. Thanks for your patience.”
 
(via Super Punch)

 
The great inventor Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856.

 
Dangerous Minds readers who are lucky enough to live in Los Angeles (I love saying that) get yourself over to the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre’s website right away to reserve your FREE tickets to a special screening with the creators of one of the single best, most genius comedy series of ALL TIME (so say I!):

Come and witness the nonsensical wonders of science as Robert Popper & Peter Serafinowicz present an audio/visual presentation of handpicked episodes from their BAFTA nominated comedy series Look Around You: Season One, on the day of its DVD release. The critically acclaimed series, which first premiered on BBC AMERICA and currently airs on Adult Swim, guides us through a series of madcap science experiments. In Season One, viewers observe a colony of ants build an igloo, find out the largest number in the world and more.

*Please ensure you have your copybooks at hand as you will be asked to take down notes from the screen.

Tickets are FREE but a reservation is required. Limit TWO tickets per customer.
Tickets will be released on Friday, July 9th.

The password is “thants”

Below, the wonderful “Germs” episode: