Links For July 24, 2015
On The Road With The Teen Social-Media Sensations Of DigiTour
Beyond the dirt bike stunt, Hayes doesn’t do much during the half hour or so he spends onstage. Though several DigiTour-ers harbor musical ambitions (and, in most cases, the talent to realize them), beyond moderate charisma and those pop idol looks, Hayes doesn’t seem to — or even purport to — have any of the qualities that one might equate with sell-out-a-theater stardom. He doesn’t sing or act or play an instrument or tell great jokes or even play sports exceptionally well; he just is, and that is far more than enough.
That street brawl, involving a van full of pies and a cast of dozens, is gleeful, gore-free carnage – a classic movie moment in its own right. But until now, the fight, and the film it belongs to, have been truncated. The Battle of the Century was formed of two reels, and much of it has been missing since the silent era. The fight itself, or at least most of it, had been preserved, but the rest was not to be found. The first reel was discovered in the late 1970s, but the second reel, which contains the piefight, has been unseen for decades longer.
Paul Built a Commodore: A hardware-based restoration of the 'first art videogame'
The three had developed Mike Builds a Shelter as part of an installation for a 1983 exhibition by Smith at Castelli Graphics, NYC, GOVERNMENT APPROVED HOME FALLOUT SHELTER AND SNACK BAR; this comprised a build-out of the titular shelter, and the videogame in a custom, upright arcade cabinet. In the game, air sirens blast, and a pixel version of Smith’s recurring dopey, tv-dadish “Mike” is charged with moving three blocks from the 1st floor of a suburban house to its basement to create a fallout shelter before the bomb hits (spoiler: it’s impossible to win).
Under the cover of a thick fog, on the first night of February 2013, Mauro ffortissimo rolled an old grand piano onto the bluffs over Half Moon Bay. His plan was to play the same Schumann Arabesque each night at sunset. The next day a few friends, cyclists, and dog walkers gathered along the coastal trail to watch as Mauro propped open the lid, clipped his sheet music to the stand, and brought the hundred year old piano back to life.
Redrawing Taylor Swift - Shake it Off Rotoscoped
49 University of Newcastle Australia animation students were each given 52 frames of Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off music video, and together they produced 2767 frames of lovingly hand-drawn rotoscoped animation footage.