I Love This Video Remix

Basically, this YouTube user took an old Mario game and mixed the sounds together to make a pretty amazing song. It’s interesting how he changes the pitch and speed of the clips to make the music, and you can see each part of the game that he’s using. At one point there is up to 5 or 6 layers of music going on at once, and I don’t know if this is just me, but to make something like that just off the top of your head must take some talent.

via: YouTube

Virtual Babies?

Apparently, a couple in South Korea starved their real life baby because they were too preoccupied with the child they had on an online “Second Life” video game. You know, video games are fun and all, but when you begin to care more about your fake, polygonal child than you do your real child… it’s just ridiculous. Though, I have to say, this isn’t as bad as the case of the man who died from too much non-stop playing of the popular online strategy game StarCraft. Coincidentally, that man just so happened to live in South Korea as well. Hopefully there isn’t some sort of epidemic going on in which people forget that they have real lives to attend to.

via: Gizmodo

It’s official: Google is taking over the world

The mayor of Topeka, Kansas has temporarily changed the name of the city to:

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It sort of blew my mind when I saw this, but I soon calmed down when I read that it would only be for a month. Mayor Bill Bunten hopes that the name change will be noticed by Google, who is soon to install new internet connections in select areas that are said to be 100 times faster than anywhere else. Bunten hopes that Topeka will become more appealing to a younger demographic as well as a more popular town in general. “The young people are the ones that caught onto this and go to the Internet and asked people in the city to sign on as supporting Google coming to Topeka,” said Bunten.

Personally, I don’t quite think “Google” is as clever as “ToPikachu,” which was the city’s name for a day back in 1998 when Pokemon was all the rage. Though, I do think that this little publicity stunt will be a success on the Mayor’s part. I guess all you have to do for some amazingly fast internet is suck up to one of the world’s most powerful corporations.

via: CNN

Old Master Painting Research

The piece I chose to base my video off of is People in Sacks, which is part of a series of prints done by Francisco Goya from 1815–1824 titled Los Disparates (or, “Nonsense.”) Goya was a Spanish artist considered to be the last of the Old Masters as well as the Father of Modern Art. His earlier work included portraits of Spanish royalty, but as his career went on, his art became darker and darker. After becoming deaf in the late 18th century, his work began to project his physical and mental anguish. His Black Paintings, a collection of 14 separate pieces, were the result of illness in his later years, and contained very morbid themes as seen in one of his more famous paintings, Saturn Devouring His Son:

The series of images that People in Sacks is from is a collection of about 20 prints, all of which are seemingly random and unrelated. Throughout Los Disparates, there are lots of strange figures dressed in hooded robes and other kinds of loose cloth, which give the paintings a mysterious aura about them. Who are these people? What are they doing? Do they represent anything? With images of violence and sex, some have suggested that the prints were intended to be some sort of social commentary. The time period in which they were completed was when Goya was leaving Spain, so perhaps they have a somewhat anti-establishment meaning behind them.

When looking at People in Sacks specifically, I imagine that what I am seeing is merely one section of a long trail of people migrating from one place to another. The figure on the far right gives me a sense of overall motion and direction within the image. I feel that the entire group of people in the print are on the same wavelength as this person, and that they are traveling together. However, when it comes to making my video, I want to take a more nonsensical approach rather than trying to find a meaning with this image. I will take the dark and mysterious themes of People and Sacks and try and recreate them in video form through illusions that will hopefully fool the viewer. Though my video will not have a direct narrative meaning, I hope to still create something that can be interpreted in a variety of ways.