Animation Spotlight: The Chimney Sweep

What a paper airplane has to do with the quiet art of being human.

It’s video week on Brain Pickings, and we’re launching with The Chimney Sweep, a beautiful stop-motion animation in every sense of the word — beautifully written, beautifully art-directed, beautifully shot.

It isn’t flashy. There are no special effects or peppy indie music score. It’s quiet and simple and incredibly, touchingly human.

Put your headphones on to fully experience the subtle yet rich soundscape — it’s part of the film’s quiet magic.

The Chimney Sweep is the final-year work of UK art student Joseph Mann — whose feet are firmly planted in our up-and-coming talent to watch list.

Futility Paints Utility: Wikipedia Reproduced

A 5,000-page homage to the times, or what the Boston Molasses Disaster has to do with digital culture.

Wikipedia is the world’s most glorious case study in crowdsourcing. And its utility isn’t merely in the amount of information available, but also in the incredible accessibility of it — anything from a complete run-down of Seinfeld to the Boston Molasses Disaster is just a search box and a few hits on the keyboard away.

So what happens if the same immense pool of information were available, only in a much less user-friendly format?

That’s exactly what art student Rob Matthews explores in his Wikipedia reproduction project — a 5,000-page tome containing all of Wikipedia’s featured articles, so large and dense that the Gutenberg press would’ve chocked on it.

A completely preposterous proposition, the project is a testament to the digital convenience we’ve come to take for granted. It’s a brilliant homage to Wikipedia’s utility by painting the utter futility of its analog antithesis.

Reproducing Wikipedia in a dysfunctional physical form helps to question its use as an internet resource.

Now, instead of leafing through to page 1,327 of the fully printed Wikipedia, go read all about the Boston Molasses Disaster just by clicking here.

via GOOD

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Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self

What hacking has to do with art, technology and being human.

If you enjoyed last week’s BioMapping project, it’s time we took it to the major leagues — of biometric visualization, art, and sociology, that is.

Emotional Cartography is an excellent, free book on emotion mapping, featuring a collection of essays by artists, designers, psychologists, cultural researchers, futurists and neuroscientists. Together, they explore the political, social and cultural implications of dissecting the private world of human emotion with bleeding-edge technology.

From art projects to hi-tech gadgets, the collection looks at emotion in its social context. It’s an experiment in cultural hacking — a way to bridge the individual with the collective through experiential interconnectedness.

Hacking is an idea, as well as a social movement, which is about subverting and reclaiming the tools and metaphors that we’re given. Hacking is a DIY culture of action — a very individualistic community, but still a community with a vision of shared benefits.

Download the book in PDF here, for 53 glorious pages of technology, art and cultural insight.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.