© Thibaut Charlut / La Blogothèque Productions (via YouTube)
Une chorégraphie Originale par Sadeck Waff is an astonishing choreography for the Olympic and Paralympic Games 2024 in Paris crafted by Sadeck Waff, captured by La Blogothèque.
The video shows him performing with 126 professionals and amateurs to music composed by Woodkid, performed by the Orchestre National de France. A marvellous piece of art.
© Kirby Ferguson (via YouTube)
Our creativity comes from without, not from within. We are not self made, we are dependent on one another. Admitting this to ourselves isn’t an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness —it’s a liberation from our misconceptions, and it’s an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves, and to simply begin.
As creatives, we are usually driven to chase what we think of as purely original ideas. While I was studying design, a video series called Everything is a Remix was making the rounds, offering another –presumably much healthier– perspective on novelty and inspiration.
A decade later, Kirby Ferguson is apparently redoing the series for 2021 and I recommend every creative to watch it —but especially those who are still in training.
© Yuki Kawae (via YouTube)
Because we all need less noise.
I could watch this all day: Meditative video by Yuki Kawae exploring different patterns in his minimal Zen garden. Tempted to use the practical tips from his website to build my own little Zen garden now.
© RJ Bruni / Inmist Media House (via Vimeo)
A story about a ceramic artist, Cathy Terepocki, and her journey to find purpose within her work. When most artists are seeking to further put themselves at the forefront of their work Cathy made a conscious decision to actually remove her personal touch.
I always enjoy watching craftsmanship, especially if it’s captured with such a pleasing –and extremly well-suited– granular and tactile aesthetic like in this beautiful short called Shared Earth.
© Sam H. Buchanan (via Vimeo)
By far and away the silliest thing I’ve ever made, felt appropriate to make something silly this year [the short was filmed in 2020].
Loving this absurd short: Every Sport a Bowling Ball.
© Jason Bruges Studio / Sam King (via Vimeo)
An interesting installation by London based Jason Bruges Studio for the past Olympic and the upcoming Paralympic Games in Tokyo:
The Constant Gardeners will create a new visual language to communicate and celebrate the motion of the professional athletes and their feats of physical prowess. The installation will produce dynamic, representative patterns, which ‘the gardeners’, a team of four industrial robot arms mounted on linear rails, will precisely rake into a large-scale gravel canvas, consisting of fourteen tonnes of crushed black basalt, surrounded by a further four tonnes of silver-grey granite. In a series of daily performances, ‘the gardeners’ will work together to create around one-hundred-and-fifty unique illustrations throughout the duration of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
© Go Project Films (via YouTube)
Silence isn’t the absence of something, but the presence of everything.
Acoustic ecologist –who’d knew, that such a profession exists– Gordon Hempton in Sanctuaries of Silence, a beautiful short film by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee and Adam Loften. The 360°-/Virtual Reality-film takes the viewer to the Hoh Rain Forest, a protected area in a National Park in the State of Washington, North America where Hempton has been documenting the sounds of nature for more than thirty-five years.
The website accompanying the short film, in addition, offers a nice little five-step exercise to practice listening and be present, open, and curious in a world increasingly polluted by noise.
© Aeon (via Vimeo)
A drolly cheerful celebration of the very ordinary, Born to be Mild explores the uncommon hobbies practiced by the members of the Dull Men’s Club – an online community that connects ‘dull men, and women who appreciate dull men’.
aeon.co/videos/the-dull-men-s-club-where-being-extraordinarily-ordinary-is-celebrated
© Above&Below and Einar Fehrholz (via Vimeo)
Aquateque is a short film and multimedia installation exploring the river Ruhr through a variety of new media technologies. The diverse ecosystem of the surrounding is captured through audio, visual and 3d modelling tools and transformed into a generative augmented space. The project explores themes such as digital material ecology and neural networks as artistic tools to dream about alternative and fantastical worlds in which nature, machines and humans collide.
© Ed Banger Records / Because Music / Genesis (via YouTube)
We were really attracted by the epic visual appeal of cymbal making: bronze, fire, hammers —something almost mythological and elemental like Vulcan or the Nibelungen. We chose Bosphorus Cymbals in Turkey because they had this very traditional process that barely changed in centuries; in this video I am just a link in the chain of production and quality control, after all these cymbals have been melted, hand hammered, and lathed into a musical object.
I’m not sure why Gaspard Augé created only such a short teaser video for the first single from his upcoming solo album, even though Force Majeure is already out in the –seemingly– full version on Spotify and YouTube (without a proper video). Either way I really would’ve liked to see more of the shown traditional craftsmanship paired with the driving electronic music —probably because Augé’s music helps me to cope better with the recently announced break-up of Daft Punk.
© Six N. Five (via Vimeo)
Ordinary, everyday objects are the ones who rebel in a high-class house. Hidden, invisible, concealed, they disrupt the harmony of the calculated interior design. A true class revolution takes place, where the underdogs rise up against a so-called perfection.
I’ve been a huge fan of the beautiful, hyper-realistic CGI Six N. Five crafts for quite a while now and the latest short –of which a special version was sold as a NFT– is no exception. The Revolt features the clean and smooth signature aesthetic, the strong physicality and the excellent fabric qualities I admire within the imagery of the studio from Barcelona.
Besides the linked video, there’s a free desktop-application for this piece which enables the user to roam the house freely and discover the individual furniture objects with, alongside other options, Virtual Reality hardware. And while the visual fidelity naturally looses some of its high quality when experienced through a current VR headset, I’m still impressed what the small studio was able to pull off with the different set pieces here.
© Monocle (via Vimeo)
About the digital decency manifesto:
Technology is everywhere but that ubiquity can come at a cost to our health, wellbeing and the quality of our conversations. View our manifesto for a more dignified relationship with all things digital and learn to be a little kinder and more cautious online.
monocle.com/film/affairs/monocle-s-digital-decency-manifesto/