Multimedia Spotlight: Vocal Improvisation Animated

How a laptop and a highway play together, or what geometry has to do with music.

Today’s short-and-sweet is Improvisation 2 — an audiovisual experiment by multimedia artist/singer Fredo Viola, who explores the environment solely with his voice and what he sees around him.

The vocal improvisation was recorded on a laptop mic, then stunningly animated using footage from New York’s West Side Highway arranged into a mesmerizing swirl of circles and hexagons.

The video is intended to be experienced in a more interactive way that allows you to drag, drop and play with the various spinning shapes — give it a spin.

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Beautiful Connections: The Art of Conversation

The color of conversation, 6 million colors, and why Flash is more antisocial than your misanthropic uncle.

Universal love for the iPhone aside, when it comes to the creative exploration of a gadget’s cultural context, Apple has nothing on Nokia. To promote the Nokia’s E71 smartphone, Wieden + Kennedy London came up with Beautiful Connections — a multimedia homage to the art of conversation.

From text art to a mobile app to short films inspired by the beauty of everyday conversation, the microsite is pure visual indulgence.

It also invites visitors to create their own audiovisual art piece, using their computer’s webcam, microphone or keyboard to explore how text, sound, color and motion influence your message. Here’s ours:

The winner of the film contest, Ewan Watson, used rotoscoping to create S I G N A L S — a colorful play on communication signals.

You can see the other 4 film finalists here, here, here, and — our uncontested favorite — here.

Which brings us to our only gripe with the project: The inherent unshareability of Flash content — the medium blatantly contradicts the message if none of the work can be shared in “everyday conversation” via individual permalinks or… gasp… embed code.

How did the W+K team miss the irony here?

Interview with Chunnel.TV Founder Matthew Berman

What Banksy, TED, and a global network of ad agencies have in common, or why the long tail is the shortest way to cultural revolution.

Today, we’re picking the brains behind Chunnel.TV — a revolutionary entertainment network for left-of-center creative content that acts as a global collaboration tool connecting underground artists and producers alike. A big idea, if we ever saw one.

Hey Matt, good to have you. Tell us a bit about yourself, your background and your brand of curiosity.

Thanks for this opportunity. I’d like to start by saying how impressed I am by your site, your dedication to Brain Pickings, and your general good-taste.

I’m Matthew Berman, co-founder and CMO of Chunnel.TV, an online distribution network for independent films, music, art, and other unique content. I first came about the Chunnel working as a freelance music producer composing tracks for various new media projects. That’s how I met Jake Septimus, whom I ended up interning for and then eventually starting Chunnel.TV with.

I’m originally from New York, but I moved to New Orleans to attend university. This past year, I’ve been to the Middle East, South America, Australia, and Asia.

I currently live in New Orleans, a city of dark whiskeys and dimly lit taverns, but our main office is in NYC. My passion is in music, guitar playing, composing, and recording.

What was the first inspiration behind Chunnel? Take us to that very first brainstorming session, the proverbial paper napkin on which you jotted down the original idea.

The Chunnel evolved as a series of informal discussions between Jake Septimus and myself. On one hand we were noticing the proliferation of digital media tools, a rise in the quality and quantity of independent content, and a soft-spoken backlash against mainstream content (i.e. reality shows, teen dramas, etc).

On the other hand we were witnessing a rising trend towards video on the internet. There was so much content available on the web that neither one of us really knew how to cut through the static.

The concept of “underground” is very murky these days. Even Banksy has a website. How do you define “underground” content in Chunnel terms?

We see “underground” media as being far on the fringe of mainstream, such that a majority of people wouldn’t know it exists — yet. The beauty of the internet, however, is that major communities can form around these seemingly niche concepts.

We’re big believers in the power of human-curated content here. How do you decide what makes “the Chunnel cut” and what doesn’t? Your editorial filtration system, if you will.

Basically, the content has to pass an internal test. We have a team of hip, creative and unique people, and if we all think a piece of content is hot, interesting, or Chunnel-worthy, then we’ll post it up.

What’s your relationship with WPP’s United Network? Does it predate Chunnel, or did they reach out to you once you were up and running?

WPP’s United Network gave us the money to start the site. Chunnel.TV was incubated from the NYC office of Berlin Cameron United, of United Network. Jake (Septimus) was working as Creative Director when I started doing intern/music work for him, so the relationship did exist prior to launch.

They don’t dictate what we put on the site, but they might have some pretty dope techie tools for us to experiment with in the future. We retain creative control and try to bring the user the best possible experience.

It’s tricky to talk about commercial work in the context of “underground” culture, but you have a Commercial channel. We love seeing that – it shows the complex relationship content consumers have come to have with creativity in all its forms. How do you think people’s perception of creative authenticity has evolved in terms of all the great work out there that still falls within the commercial realm?

Banksy himself said:

The thing I hate most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative, and ambitious young people leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

While I think most people find the majority of advertising to be nothing more than an annoyance, the stigma of ‘selling out’ has definitely dissipated within society. I also think creative authenticity depends on the product, budget, and client. People will give premium liquor or perfume ads more creative leeway than say Pine-sol, allowing the advertisers to do some really interesting work.

That being said, if an advertiser really gets pop culture they could create truly brilliant ads with nearly any brand.

What’s your long-term vision for Chunnel and its growth as a cultural agent? Any exciting developments in the works?

We’d like Chunnel.TV to fill the void MTV left when they went mainstream. We hope to capture the imagination of the culturally curious, and introduce people to art, music, film or other content they might not have otherwise seen.

We’re working with indie filmmakers to bring exclusive shows to The Chunnel. Our first batch of shows are Reel Review, Jamaica Originates, and Duncan and Eddie, and we expect to have more.

We’re also going to open up our platform to guest bloggers and our user base. People are going to have the ability to post articles up on Chunnel.TV, which will be put up on review before published. Also, we’d like to implement a lot more interactive features so us like-minded people could better communicate.

It’s going to be an exciting few months for Chunnel.TV.

If you could speak at TED, what would the title of your talk be? Will you get a Standing O?

Haha, I see you have a TED talk fetish as well. My favorite TED talk is Benjamin Zander on music and passion, so I’d like to perform in a similar vein. My talk would focus on leadership, the benefits and hardships of standing above the fray, and would end in a slow blues jam.

I think I’ll call it Electric Ladyland — unless that’s already been taken. As for the standing ovation, one can only hope.

Well, thanks for letting us pick your brains. Any last thoughts left unpicked?

Again thanks for your time, I really do love your site.

As for everyone else, please check us out at Chunnel.TV and follow us on Twitter or MySpace. I can also be contacted at matt[at]chunnel.tv.

Take care.

TED 2009 Highlights: Day 2

Lots and lots (and lots) of brilliance, wrapped in fascination and tied with a shiny ribbon of sheer jaw-droppingness.

Despite our sleep-deprived state, we managed to live-blog our way through another day of TED. Well, sort of — the guys at Long Beach had severe technical difficulties on their end, which sort of reduced TED to ED for a couple of hours.

But sleeplessness and glitches notwithstanding, it was a phenomenal day embezzled with a number of well-deserved standing ovations. Neurologist extraordinaire Oliver Sacks opened the See session with a fascinating talk about a specific kind of visual hallucinations in perfectly sane blind patients, called Charles Bonnet syndrome, which occur because visual receptors become hyperactive when they receive no real input. Apparently, over 10% of blind people get this, but only about 1% ever acknowledge it in fear of being ridiculed and perceived as insane — what a stark reminder of the clash between cognitive health and social health.

UCSB researcher JoAnn Kuchera-Morin followed, introducing perhaps the most fascinating piece of the night: The AlloSphere machine, a “scientific data discovery and artistic creation tool.” She proceeded to show phenomenal imagery, including the AlloBrain — a project that builds medical narrative through real fMRI data mapped sonicly and visually, with tremendously rich potential for medical application.

Also shown: the multi-center hydrogen bonds of a new material used for transparent solar cells, a clearly gigantic stride for clean energy. The footage itself was absolutely stunning, especially framed in the knowledge that it’s all real, not a CGI simulation.

Another visually and conceptually captivating talk came next, with light and space sculptor Olafur Eliasson. He tossed the audience into a visual experiment right there on the stage screen, demonstrating the link between eye and brain in a very raw, tangible way before introducing his equally compelling work — work that is, above all, creating a sense of consequence by making space accessible and instilling in people a sense of community and togetherness.

Olafur’s entire talk was a string of eye-opening epiphanies on the nature of art, our relationship to the world and each other, our shared sense of responsibility.

Art is obviously not just about decorating the world, but also about taking responsibility.

True that.

Ed Ulbrich was next, with perhaps the biggest shock-value jaw-dropper of the night: He took us behind the scenes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, revealing that Brad Pitt’s character was actually entirely computer-generated from the neck up. Crafting it was so laborious that just the person responsible for the character’s eye system spent over two full years on it. (Pause on that for a moment.)

They also had to create every possible lighting condition for the character, in order to make him appear realistic and believable in all scenes.

Their biggest challenge was animating facial emotion. Traditionally, facial animation is done by recording the motion on 100 surface polygons, with 100 tracking points. But they found that the richest emotional information came from the stuff between the points. So, unsurprisingly to us, they turned to one of our greatest heroes: Paul Ekman and his brilliant Facial Action Coding System.

Setting up a system of 3D cameras, they were able to record a surface of over 100,000 polygons, tracking 10,000 points.

We ended up calling the entire process “emotion capture” rather than “motion capture.”

In the end, Ulbrich made an excellent point that most of us hardly give much thought to: Despite the technological advances and the computer-generated character, animating it still fell on Brad Pitt’s unique acting skill and dramatic capacity — because the Button character, tech smoke-and-mirrors notwithstanding, is but a digital puppet to be operated entirely by its actor-puppeteer.

Closing the See session was experimental audio-visual artist Golan Levin, who introduced a mind-blowing subtitling technology that animates text with the amplitude, pitch and frequency of the speaker’s voice, so that the text literally becomes alive with meaning. Levin also revealed his fascination with the human gaze, introducing a revolutionary eye-tracking system aimed at making the computer aware of what it is looking at and able to respond.

What if art was aware we were looking at it, how could it respond?

He proceeded to show off another rather peculiar (by which we mean creepy-cool) extension of the technology: The Double-Taker, an enormous eye of a snout that follows a person as he or she moves through space, in a very organic albeit creepy way.

And although we were teched out of much of the Understand session that followed, regretfully missing anthropologist Nina Jablonski‘s much- anticipated talk, we did catch Elizabeth Gilbert‘s profound insight on the paradox of the creative process, which is always inevitably tied to anguish as artists fear being unable to outdo themselves creatively.

The final session, Invent, opened with iconic yet controversial architect Daniel Libeskind, whose reconstruction plan for Ground Zero was the people’s choice, but was tragically crushed by commercial pressures and had to give way to the current winner. Libeskind talked about the clash between hand and computer, pointing out the challenge of making the computer respond to the hand rather than vise-versa.

Showcasing some of his phenomenal commercial and concept work, he raised deeper questions about the role of architecture in the human story.

Architecture is not only the giving of answers, it’s also the asking of questions.

Green auto pioneer Shai Agassi followed. Besides showing the enormity of the scale, on which cars impact the world, he also drew a rather brilliant analogy: Before the Industrial Revolution, much of the U.K.’s labor force came from an immoral element — human slaves. And as soon as slavery ended, the Industrial Revolution began. We are, in effect, getting much of our energy from an immoral source, subjecting the planet to a form of slavery. Ending “planetary slavery” is the only way to the next social revolution.

True that.

The remaining talks showcased a broad range of truly revolutionary innovation in robotics and medicine, from Catherine Mohr‘s amazing surgical robots, to Robert Full‘s brilliant technology simulating the toe-peeling and air-righting of the gecko, to Daniel Kraft‘s Marrow Miner tool that bypasses transplant pain by allowing local anaeshtesia, harvesting 10 times more marrow.

Finally, polymorphic playwright Sarah Jones, one of the best entertainers to ever hit TED stage, closed the session with her truly — truly — captivating performance of her array of characters, each of whom she channels to an unbelievable level of believability. That’s one talk you’d want to see when it becomes available.

The last segment was the awarding of this year’s TED Prize, the streaming of which was accessible to everyone online and available in select theaters across the U.S. The winners — marine preservation advocate Sylvia Earle, space explorer Jill Tarter, and music education pioneer José Abreu — are every bit as deserving as you’d expect, so be sure to check out their wishes — and if you’re passionate about that field, you can even offer help to each of the three on his or her TED Prize page.

We’ll be live-blogging today as well, so be sure to follow us on Twitter if you’re into, you know, hearing stuff before everyone else does.