Machine Thinking

Printing a Book, Old School from Armin Vit on Vimeo.

This 1947 Encyclopedia Britannica film shows in detail the processes of making a book from the linotype machine through a fully bound book. It’s fascinating how many complex steps are completely automated and how other processes are fairly manual (usually done by “girls”).

There are few machines that can compete with the printing press for their impact on the way we think and represent the physical replication of memes.

(via ilovetypography)

Virtual Ball Pit from Kevin Atkinson on Vimeo.

Kevin Atkinson created a neat virtual ball pit application that works in real time:

I’ve been playing with real-time physics libraries for a while, both 3d and 2d, and I’ve been wanting to do something for a while, but I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to come up with anything that grabbed me. But a couple weeks ago I had a brainwave and wrote this in just a couple days.

For those interested in such things, I didn’t use Box2D, which seems the current champ in developer mindshare in this tiny niche. I started out using it, and it’s quite nice, but it just wasn’t fast enough when I used enough circles/pixels to generate an intelligible representation of the video stream (there’re about a 1000 used in the demo above). Luckily, I chanced across the chipmunk physics library which uses some kind of fancy-pants geometric hashing to speed up collision testing, and it works quite nicely in real-time with 1000 pixels/circles.

Link

“A Series of Passionate but Arbitrary Decisions”

“It’s the things you can’t change that shape you”

“No Reward for Good Behavior”

More information on the artist here

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Based on the lyric (and alternate title) “Big Ideas: Don’t get any” I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there

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The last segment of Disney’s Magic Highway USA. While much of it will likely never come true, there is a surprising amount that hasn’t yet, but you can imagine the not distant future when cell and GPS technology will be more closely integrated into cars.




Jim Henson (yes, that Jim Henson) explores what it means to be trapped by time and machines.From the IMDB listing for “Time Piece”:

Dislocation in time, time signatures, time as a philosophical concept, and slavery to time are some of the themes touched upon in this nine-minute, experimental film, which was written, directed, and produced by Jim Henson-and starred Jim Henson! Screened for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in May of 1965, Time Piece enjoyed an eighteen-month run at one Manhattan movie theater and was nominated for an Academy Award for outstanding short subject.”