It would look something like this…
Sanity Not Included is a VO-based comedy series, now in it’s second season on Machinima. I highly recommend it for those who have a borderline obsessive love of video games or just like to see their favorite characters in normal, every day life scenarios.
Reuben Margolin is a bay-area artist who makes “Techno-Kinetic Wave Sculptures.” Don’t be intimidated if you don’t know what that phrase means, because until I watched the above video, I had no idea either. Basically, Margolin makes sculptures that mimic nature on both a very large and very small scale. As an example, imagine a the spiral wave a canoe paddle makes as it pushes through the water, but blown up 100x larger and made out of a latticework of carved wood beams (or just skip to 1:04 in the video if your brain comes up short on the image like mine would.)
There’s something both unsettling and incredibly mesmerizing about seeing them in motion, but the process by which they’re created is spectacular. His work requires an absolute ton of mathematics, carving or otherwise creating incredibly precise and intricate moving parts by hand, then assembling them into these gigantic moving sculptures that look simultaneously familiar and foreign. The video details the creative process behind one such piece – the intersection of two wave forms – from conception through completion.
Joseph Brett‘s recut trailer for the 1980′s teen classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is reinterpreted as something closer to Garden State. And it works really really well.
Next To Heaven first premiered in 2006, but creator Rob Parrish’s surreal and strange combination of stock footage, enhanced with new voice-over, creates unique and at times bizarre snippets of storytelling. Season 1 ended in 2007; Season 2 began a few weeks ago. But the series, overall, is timeless.
There’s not much you can do to try and describe Die Antwoord. The South African group is part rap, part rave and all forms of crazy. Combine their unique sound with Harmony Korine‘s directorial talents and you get “Umshini Wam” (Bring Me My Machine Gun). It’s fifteen minutes of wheel-chair gangstas, smoking and popping their way through insanity. Enjoy.
I’m not ashamed of my love of Epic Meal Time, an over-the-top dudes cooking show that became on overnight success on YouTube. I embrace it and will continue to watch every episode twice as long as the show baffles and disgusts me, but sort of makes me hungry at the same time.
However, I was a little surprised to see a parody of the popular Epic Meal Time series also launch to astronomical success. Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time has the same humor as Epic, but instead of making insane head-sized Massive Meat Logs, they cook dinner.
So what has Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time taught me? Parodies can and often do become as popular as their iconic inspirations. Homes in Sweden actually look like showrooms at Ikea! And I could never live in Sweden because they use far too much mayo in their cooking. I hate mayo.
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Mashup culture. I love the idea of taking disparate works of art and combining them to create something brand new. The further apart the original works, the more creativity needed to bring them together harmoniously. At their best, Mashups bring to light new elements of previously familiar works, forcing us to examine in more detail what we thought we already knew.
It’s also no secret the world is going through some very difficult times right now. Widescale personal communication and connectivity is bringing old traditions crashing headlong into the new at breakneck speeds, and the results are both unprecedented and violent. As I type, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Iran, and a half dozen other countries are creating new chapters in their history books, brought about largely by and through social media and global communications.
The above video, United We Rise by Peop1e, embodies this mashup ideology to present a new facet to what has become fairly familiar global politics. The primary video element is footage from the recent Egyptian revolution – personal and occasionally voyeuristic in its simplicity and access. For the audio, we hear Eddie Hazel’s single-take blues guitar solo from Funkadelic’s 1971 song Maggot Brain. And running through both the audio and video is Charlie Chaplin’s stirring climactic speech from his 1940 film The Great Dictator.
This is a new type of mashup for me, one created not for the sake of experimentation and art, but for better understanding and communication. The result is…visceral. Old media combined with new, utilizing social media and global communication to tell the stories of the modern world in a way that’s more easily understood and less easily ignored than the daily news cycle. Each of the elements is separately beautiful, but together they harmonize into a moving and emotional view of what the new history of the world could be if we want it to be.
Birds + CCTV = clever re-imagining of surveillance culture. A project by Thomas voor ‘t Hekke and Bas van Oerle.
This is a commercial for Kentucky Fried Chicken featuring the cast of Star Trek: The Original Series. According to YouTube comments, it was allegedly filmed in 1991, around the same time as the filming of Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. Warning: Something is very very WRONG here. This might have been a better pick for Here’s Some Weird.
I just got back from SXSW yesterday and have had little time to reflect on the changes that have taken place at the event throughout the years. While getting back into the swing of things, I received an email from my friend @oso, which made me laugh hysterically. It’s definitely a sentiment I heard many voice throughout my time in Austin. 
