The Kid Should See This.
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There's just so much science, nature, music, art, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...
But we don't underestimate kids around here.
Kid-friendly not-made-for-kids videos for all! Collected by Rion Nakaya and her three four year old co-curator.
Tip Jar: Curating this blog takes work! If you like the videos on this site, please support the science education projects that we've picked on DonorsChoose.org.
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Waves by Daniel Palacios is a great example of where art and science can come together in a way that makes a huge impression. Made of two turbines and a piece of rope, the kinetic sculpture not only visualizes a harmonic series or sine-waves, but it also reacts and changes in the presence of people around it.
A long piece of rope represents three dimensionally a series of waves floating in space, as well as producing sounds from the physical action of their movement: the rope which creates the volume also simultaneously creates the sound by cutting through the air, making up a single element.
Depending on how we may act in front of it, according to the number of observers and their movements, it will pass from a steady line without sound to chaotic shapes of irregular sounds (the more movement there is around the installation) through the different phases of sinusoidal waves and harmonic sounds.
Beautiful stuff. Waves will be at the LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, Spain until June 25th.
Artist Jim Campbell describes the process of developing and creating Exploded Views, a commissioned work that was installed in SFMOMA’s atrium in November 2011.
More light, more art, more San Francisco, more museums.
Meet the Ornate Ghost Pipefish. A relative of seahorses, they are brilliantly colored and beautifully distinctive. This video needs to be seen full screen.
The Ornate Ghost Pipefish or Solenostomus paradoxus is one of the hardest fish to spot in the ocean. First of all they are relatively small, only growing to about 12cm in maximum length. This combined with the fact that their bodies look more like coral or seaweed than an actual saltwater fish, makes them a master of camouflage!
This species is just one of the over 200 different species of Pipefish! …Ornate Ghost Pipefish are normally found in the Pacific and Indian Oceans in and around reefs. They come in a variety of colors including black, yellow, red and even transparent! … They use their mouths as a vacuum of sorts to consume their food, normally tiny crustaceans.
And for a bit more, check out this series of videos at Advanced Aquarist, which features two ornate ghost pipefish and their larvae at the California Academy of Sciences.
Remember those origami examples and how tos? Here’s a simple but illuminating stop motion animation of a car being made out of one sheet of newsprint to help visualize some more complex folding! Also check out a pre-made origami Rhino unfolding. Both pieces feature the work of origami artist, Sipho Mabona, who has an installation of origami locusts (made from sheets of money) at the Japanese American National Museum in LA until August 26, 2012.
via This is Colossal.
Metropolis II, a kinetic sculpture created by Chris Burden, is currently showing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Steel beams form an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including one 6 lane freeway, and HO scale train tracks… According to Burden, “The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars, produces in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active and bustling 21st Century city.”
LACMA’s blog gives some detail:
- The cars are attached by a small magnet to the conveyor belt that brings them to the crest.
- The only motorization of the cars is the conveyor belt to the top.
- Once the cars cross over the crest and head downward, their entire movement is by gravity.
- They travel at a scale speed of 240 mph, plus or minus.
- The tracks they take are Teflon coated to reduce friction.
- The tracks are beveled at 7 degrees to give added torque for speed when
they come through corners and curves.- The trains are out of the box electric train sets that run on electricity.
Taken at Burden’s studio, this video is a bit shorter and perhaps provides a better understanding of the scale and constant sound that the 1,100 toy cars produce. Metropolis II is currently an ongoing installation at LACMA with showtimes on Fridays and weekends.
This video (which picks up at about 40 seconds) is by the fascinating Jim Le Fevre, “a BAFTA and British Animation Award winning free-lance film maker mostly working in animation” who experiments with (what he calls a) phonotrope, a camera and a record player. From Jim:
In March 2007 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London we hosted an evening of animation related events which I took as an opportunity to make some more examples of my Phonographantasmascope (which he’s since renamed a phonotrope), an extension of the Zoetrope principle.
It is all live action and works by using the shutter speed of the camera rather than the rather irritating stroboscope methods other 3D Zoetropes use.
The co-curator loved the little guys passing the cube around, as well as the red and white pins “kissing.” Really brilliant. Be sure to check out Jim’s site for more videos.
An introduction to the zoetrope from the team at Pixar, who wanted to show exactly how animation works.
The zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures across. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion.
This fly around of the International Space Station (ISS) is displayed in the “Moving Beyond Earth” exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Displayed as a 30ft x 18ft projection, the HD animation highlights the major components of the ISS. Video courtesy of NASA’s VR Lab.
I wasn’t sure that these “daytime fireworks” were compelling (ie. different than any other explosion) until I saw the rainbow around the 50 second mark. Wow.
At the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar this week, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang put on his largest “explosion event” of the last three years, utilizing microchip-controlled explosives to form incredible designs and patterns. The video we’ve embedded of the event is an impressive testament to how a volatile black powder explosion can be controlled and shaped by computer.
Each set of explosions was calculated to paint a different picture. One series of explosions created black smoke clouds that looked like “drops of ink splattered across the sky.”
via @nickbilton.
