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.