Karakuri

Video

Japan has always been on the forefront of cutting edge robotics. Its roots can be traced back 200-300 years during the Edo period when skilled craftsmen created automata (self-operating machines). Using nothing more than pulleys and weights they were able to make the Karakuri (Japanese automata) perform amazing tasks.

Japan’s modern day robots can be traced back to the Karakuri. Today Hideki Higashino is one of the few remaining craftsmen who is determined to keep the history and tradition of Japanese Karakuri alive.

Karakuri by Matthew Allard
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3-Way Street

Video

By summer 2010, the expansion of bike lanes in NYC exposed a clash of long-standing bad habits — such as pedestrians jaywalking, cyclists running red lights, and motorists plowing through crosswalks.

By focusing on one intersection as a case study, my video aims to show our interconnection and shared role in improving the safety and usability of our streets.

3-Way Street by RonConCocaCola Continue reading

Influencers

Video

INFLUENCERS is a short documentary that explores what it means to be an influencer and how trends and creativity become contagious today in music, fashion and entertainment.

The film attempts to understand the essence of influence, what makes a person influential without taking a statistical or metric approach.

Written and Directed by Paul Rojanathara and Davis Johnson, the film is a Polaroid snapshot of New York influential creatives (advertising, design, fashion and entertainment) who are shaping today’s pop culture.

“Influencers” belongs to the new generation of short films, webdocs, which combine the documentary style and the online experience.

influencersfilm.com Continue reading

Five emotions invented by the Internet

Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. In fact, I’ve been experiencing #3 for about the last hour:

The state of being ‘installed’ at a computer or laptop for an extended period of time without purpose, characterized by a blurry, formless anxiety undercut with something hard like desperation. During this time the individual will have several windows open, generally several browser ‘tabs,’ a Microsoft Word document in some state of incompletion, the individual’s own Facebook page as well as that of another randomly-selected individual who may or may not be on the ‘friends’ list, 2-5 Gchat conversations that are no longer immediately active, possibly iTunes and a ‘client’ for Twitter. The individual will switch between the open applications/tabs in a fashion that appears organized but is functionally aimless, will return to reading some kind of ‘blog post’ in one browser tab and become distracted at the third paragraph for the third time before switching to the Gmail inbox and refreshing it again.

The behavior equates to mindlessly refreshing and ‘lozenging’ the same sources of information repeatedly. While performing this behavior the individual feels a sense of numb depersonalization, being calmly and pragmatically aware that they have no identifiable need to be at the computer nor are they gleaning any practical use from it at that moment, and the individual may feel vaguely uncomfortable or ashamed about this awareness in concert with the fact that they continue to perform the idle ‘refreshing’ behavior. They may feel increasingly anxious and needful, similar to the sensation of having an itch that needs scratching or a thirst that needs quenching, all while feeling as though they are calm or slightly bored.

(via Five Emotions Invented By The Internet – thoughtcatalog.com)

Though they’re not really new emotions, just new situations that stir up unfamiliar combinations of emotion. The other experiences are:

  • A vague and gnawing pang of anxiety centered around an IM window that has lulled.
  • A sudden and irrational rage in response to reading an ‘@-reply’ on Twitter.
  • The car collision of appetite and discomfort one feels simultaneously when using the internet to seek and consume images or information that may be considered unseemly or inappropriate. 
  • The sense of fatigue and disconnect one experiences after emitting a massive stream of content only to hit some kind of ‘wall’ and forget and/or abandon the entire thing. 

Secret Cinema: A theatre experience I would enjoy

It was an incredible experience, and we hadn’t even been “evacuated” to the second warehouse next door to watch Blade Runner yet. That happened at 9pm, and the atmosphere was electric — literally, in fact: a reproduction of the floodlit building featured during the movie’s climax was projected onto the huge warehouse’s right-hand wall as the film reached its crescendo, to cheers and applause. Two actors, in costume, were suspended in fixed positions at the top of the wall, recreating in real life what we were seeing on-screen.

Odeon, take note: THIS is how to get people off BitTorrent and into cinemas.

(via Review: Secret Cinema brings Blade Runner to London)

This sounds amazing.