I’ve wanted to make this for a while (click ‘more’ for a bit of thrilling backstory). Building on some unprofessional yogurt pot candles I made during summer, I had a go at making a candle dipped in a different layers of colours (three; blue, red, and yellow. We like our primary colours). It was pretty difficult as you’re no doubt meant to use giant vats of wax, which I unsurprisingly don’t have and instead started with small Activia pots to begin with and ended up using bean cans. It’s pretty bumpy since towards the end it outgrew the beans pot and I ended up just pouring the wax over it. It should be nice when it melts. I suppose it’s one of those ugly children type things again. I think it’s lovely anyway.
I help at Brownies because where I come from we all believe that the quintessential Tuesday evening should be spent with high-pitched children who enjoy shuffling. Also because I get to help kids make finger puppets, and make my own. Here is Mr Lion:
Here’s my very old video from Kinetica that I’ve just put together. Because of camera ineptitude there’s no video of my favourite part: the lights that reacted to sound, but there’s an inadequate photo of them here on Flickr.
The exhibition had a section with the pencils that rotate and make circles (above) – which drew on our ability to stand aimlessly watching pencils draw motorised circles. Something I noticed is that the holder design didn’t allow for the pencils to get shorter – it didn’t compensate by pushing defaultly against the wall, but left them suspended away from the paper when they were blunt going round in sad little circles. Perhaps I’ve got too much pencil empathy.
There’s also the small beer robot that poured you beer into plastic cups and then flashed red in an alert to tell you it’s drinking time. Lots of good stuff there.
Kinetica, a number of Saturdays ago, was a mad mess of flashing lights and things that swirled. I love that it counts as art. I spent the day joining the league of irritating people with cameras, toting an EP-1 that’s never left the house – and thus have video footage.
Beside the robot that served you beer, my favourite bit was a block of hanging lights that reacted to sound. Simple but wonderful to watch. As part of the league of camera holders the adults lined up against the wall to do camera jiggery pokery, whilst a small kid ROARED at them. It was lovely, but I failed to hit the record button or some more technical error (very sad). May have to practice my button-pressing. Video on way – my laziness with it has already delayed this brief post. It will appear one day.
I saw this today and ooh ooh it’s very good. It’s made solely of music segments from Disney’s ‘Up’. The music’s all made by Pogo. Unfortunately with a library of songs made of copyrighted material he’s not on Spotify (just last.fm instead…).
It reminded me of Alice, a similar track that cuts Alice in Wonderland in the same way which turns out to be by the same guy. This made sense when I found out. I saw Alice on yoooooooooutube.com – a site which delayed and tiled Youtube videos to make strange and hypnotic patterns – and made it all look mad. Yoooooooooutube seems to be gone now though, which is sad because it was silly and nice.
I absolutely love this from BBH for Google Chrome. Unpretentious, good designs with layered card, home-made sewn bits, Pong, big bundles of wool lying around in studio, and a plinky-plonky music box soundtrack. Yum yum.
I love this concept from Marcus Walters/Mother from 2008, and I do not care if I’m a year behind the times. It reminds me of when I was in reception class [reception class where I come from is half a year of school before joining year 1] we used to spend sessions waving transparent coloured bits of acetate over our eyes and looking at windows. I’m not entirely sure for what reason. But it reminds me of feeling fun and childish and happiness. And really mesmerised, but that’s less of a Coke attribute.
I saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs last night. They had a glitter cannon, I was happy. They remind me of a band I liked during college called Elle Milano who I loved to bits in an awkward sort of way. Perhaps they don’t sound too much like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs but they made me very pleased in an “oh god, music!” sort of way and they share similar hair cuts.
Anyway, Karen O was dressed like a butterfly and also a paper-based Indian. They did a great performance of Y Control – there’s a live version on YouTube that’s great but it doesn’t embed (Watch it here). They’ve polished up since some 2006 performances but haven’t lost anything. They’re so fun to watch. And it was all very, very good.
How do you spell Summer Fate? One issue Google hasn’t been able to help me with.
Anyway, the new Vampire Weekend video is ace. It has lots of fun bright things including summer fate(?) flags and bright paint, and confetti, and bells. And coloured paper circles doing what they do best (falling and bouncing).
Not just any confetti either (not the church kind) – speedy swirling confetti the video zooms along its dolly tracks in to. (Use of running up and down the dolly tracks – another things I like about this). Cheap budget, crap props, ace video.
I wasn’t a massive fan of the song when I first heard it, but whilst watching it in order to compile the above list of fun and bright things it grew on me a lot. Actually I’ve had to restrain myself from bouncing around in my chair. I’m cool.
Made by Garth Jennings, the director of Hitchhiker’s guide director. It’s not the first interesting person they’ve had direct – Richard Ayoade did a couple too.
I wanted to write about a charity wall I saw at Bestival. At the time I thought it was great – very simply adding your support by a thumb of finger print in blue or red. I say wanted to, I can’t remember the company which I suppose takes away quite a lot of the point, but it was a really nice idea and section of the festival. Adding to the wall gave a nice sense of community and group. Without the aid of alcohol.
