Video Art
In Bb 2.0 is a "collaborative music and spoken word project" from Darren Solomon. With just the native YouTube playback interface, multiple clips can be played and controlled to create your own soothing musical mix.
Related:
MetaFilter thread on In Bb 2.0
Bb Buddha Machine, a randomizing version for continuous playback (Via MetaFilter Projects.)
Star Trek: Voyager Singularity (Fast version) (Excerpt) (Flash Video)
"Every episode of Star Trek: Voyager playing at once in a grid", made by Artie Vierkant.
This post is an ongoing collection of YouTube-based tools for making split-screen media. These web-based tools allow you to select the YouTube clips that you want to use as part of your own multi-channel mashup. I'll update this list as I find more; newer additions are nearer the top of the post.
YooouuuTuuube lays out the frames of a YouTube clip within a grid. The frames can be scrolling by as the clip plays, or be shuffled around the screen. Examples: Alice and Auto-Tune the News #2. See the related MetaFilter thread for more samples.
YouCube creates an interactive 3D cube whose faces are composed of YouTube clips. You can rotate the cube to control the visible faces and the audio mix. See the demo video for YouCube.
Public Privacy (Flash Video)
Wendy Richmond uses her cellphone camera to record New Yorkers living their daily life in different settings such as museums and streets. The clips have been compiled into split-screen layouts, suggestive of the many-eyed watchfulness of surveillance cameras but with a quiet, personal tone.
From Richmond's New York Times article, one of NYT's The City Visible columns:
Like the thousands of surveillance cameras that watch us 24/7, I record the daily activities of city life: people waiting for the subway, walking their dogs, watching a parade, window shopping. But my goal is not to catch something out of the ordinary. In this project, which I call “Public Privacy: Wendy Richmond’s Surreptitious Cellphone,” I seek just the opposite: the steady and mundane urban choreography that we all perform together. My grids are the culmination of the dances I’ve witnessed on a world-class stage: New York.
Thanks to Michael McPherson.
A Policy of Artifice (QuickTime)
Three Revolutions (QuickTime)
Two works by Frank Zadlo. A Policy of Artifice presents varying combinations of subframes showing chroma-keyed body parts and objects. Three Revolutions is described as "video documentation of channel-surfing through 100 analog tv channels, three times".
Thanks to Frank Zadlo.
François Macré - Thriller (64-Track A Cappella Version) (YouTube)
Massive breakdown and reconstruction of Michael Jackson's Thriller by François Macré. There are numerous multi-track a cappella music videos on YouTube, but this one would be hard to beat in many ways. I wish a much larger, higher-res version was available. Also, it might be interesting to (1) watch the original Thriller video alongside this clip, and (2) re-edit the clip significantly to highlight the different voice tracks (especially their entries and exits with respect to the overall song stream) by using pans, zooms, and animated subframes.
Update: Macré says we can watch a high-quality, full-screen version on Dailymotion.
Time of My Life (YouTube)
StartStopDemo3 (QuickTime)
The embedded clip is a snapshot of the ongoing Daily Photo Aging Project by Dan Hanna. It distinguishes itself from other photo-a-day time-lapse works by its duration of 17 years and its use of a custom ring apparatus.
From the project page:
The following image is of the apparatus that I am using to create a stop-motion animation of myself getting older. Every day I position myself in the center of this ring and take two simultaneous photos (180 degrees apart). The ring is marked off for the 365 days of the year and a pair of crosshairs (mounted on a sliding wooden fixture) are incremented along the circumference of the ring to line up with these markings. I use the crosshairs to position my head as nearly as possible in the center of the ring. So far, I've accumulated approximately 17 years worth of photos (the project was started in '91).
The second link above is for StartStopDemo3 by Steven Hoskins whose work I've posted before. Hoskins has collaborated with Hanna by taking the clip and reconfiguring the images in 32 asynchronous channels. The result calms the jittery headrush of the original and produces an evocative blur.
Thanks to Steven Hoskins.
Flag Waving 1 (QuickTime)
Flag Waving 3 (QuickTime)
Two multi-frame works by Steven Hoskins. Rigorous experimentation with fixed grids and organic subject results in fluid and rhythmic visuals. See his webpage for more clips.
Thanks to Steven Hoskins.
Taken (YouTube)
Taken is a media installation from 2002 by David Rokeby. It is currently on view at the Whitney in New York as part of a show called Profiling which ends on September 9. (Scroll down Whitney's current exhibits page for some details on Profiling.)
From Julie Talen who saw the exhibit:
[I]t's an intriguing example of what I call 'seeing people twice' - that unique ability of divided screens to show the same image in two entirely different ways simultaneously. Theoretically, it's all about the dangers of surveillance, which are, of course, quite maddeningly omnipresent, but are also, ironically, often quite beautiful, as they are here -- and I'm not happy with the Whitney's equating the very real issue of racial profiling with the art experience of seeing the random museum-goer on the big screen in multiples, but nonetheless, it's irresistible, a brilliant use of superimposition and the exploding of 'real-time' in video. And it's only up for another week, so I hope people get a chance to experience it.
If you are in NYC this week, this sounds like a great piece to see. Also, check out Rokeby's YouTube page for more goodness.
Thanks to Julie Talen.
Slinky (QuickTime, 640x480, 45MB)
Slinky (YouTube)
Stretchy (QuickTime, 640x480, 45MB)
Stretchy (YouTube)
Shapely (QuickTime, 640x480, 33MB)
Shapely (YouTube)
Michael Jackson - Billie Jean (Live 1983 Motown 25) (YouTube)
One of the things I did during a two-week summer break in DC was to make three video sketches grouped under White Glove Tracking visualization. These videos are based on data from White Glove Tracking, an open source project initiated by Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth. The data contains the approximate location and size of Michael Jackson's trademark white glove in all 10060 frames of his landmark Motown 25 performance of Billie Jean on March 25, 1983.
Before watching my videos, you might first watch the video of the original performance (YouTube) which is part of the downloadable dataset.
My three videos represent the combination of the original performance footage and the data on the white glove. Slinky highlights the fluidity of Jackson's movements; Stretchy brings to animated life the variety of glove sizes, positions, and contours; and Shapely illustrates the prominence of another type of white glove in Jackson's life - the surgical glove. I recommend watching the QuickTime versions which are bigger and have better quality.
The Processing source code for these three videos are available on my WGT visualization project page, if you want to play with it.
