notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Mad Men: Bittorrent Edition, by Conor McGarrigle (via, via):

the video simultaneously acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and is an aesthetically beautiful by product of the bittorrent process as the pieces of the original file are rearranged and reconfigured into a new transitory in-between state.

It also avoids infringing the copyright of Madmen as it is incomplete.

There are some interesting reactions to this on a Metafilter thread. For example, here’s Malice (#):

I’m not so sure that’s the “bittorrent edition” so much as the “online streaming of pirated tv shows” edition.

I also just don’t get how this is lovely at all. It’s rather annoying. Why anyone would voluntarily watch that is beyond me, this is the sort of thing that happens on rainy days to satellite subscribers, or when Netflix is being shitty.

Greg Nog replies (#):

It’s very pretty! And the theme of damage and incompleteness being wreaked upon a background of superficial aesthetic appeal works really well for its source material. Coupled with the (also very pretty song), I found this to hold a compellingly melancholy kind of charm for me — far more so than the AMC show holds, in fact.

shakespeherian added (#)

I think you’re missing what the draw is here for some folks, myself included. One of the ways that art functions is to draw attention to the overlooked, to find weird little spaces in common experience that people tend to skip over impatiently when they’re looking for the Real Meat Of Life, and to say: What if we just look at this one little thing? What if, instead of skipping over it, we acknowledge its commonality, we indulge it in the things we recognize about it, we allow it to play out and examine what it has to offer? Is there anything it can reveal, any way its random parts can accidentally work in concert to make something interesting? This process that so many of us participate in— torrenting episodes of a glossy-looking teevee show— what alternative results can spring from that same activity, and what happens if we just look at those results as if that was what we were trying for?

Also in the thread, as Kevin Slavin noted, there’s a good description of how the effects emerge by Rhomboid.

A timelapse of the construction of the roof of the new Kings Cross western concourse. I’d rather have embedded the longer BBC version, or their second video of the main railway shed roof renovations, or even the single shot version of the latter at Network Rail, but unfortunately they don’t seem to enable embedding.

If you’re interested in the new station: more words; more pictures; even more pictures. Why there are no water fountains. Previously: my review of new northern concourse of the Underground station.

chriswoebken:

Is this in the SF Navy Yards?

From the looks of the crane you can see out of the window at 6’15”, yes, I think it is. (This is apparently a music video for Nothing is Everything by Efdemin.)

(Source: youtube.com)

A short section of Blow-Up, showing London Wall in 1966.

new-aesthetic:

What Doesn’t Stay in Vegas? Sprawl.

I did my own version of this - with far less spatial and temporal resolution - a few years ago, but this video (by NASA Goddard Photo and Video) is far better.

One of United Healthcare’s Health in Numbers adverts, complete with a man surrounded by statistics. See also; see also.

For those poor sods who suffered through what Twitter seemed to indicate was an even more banal Brit Awards ceremony than usual, here’s the classic KLF / Extreme Noise Terror performance from 1992:

Unbelievably ENT and the KLF performed this at the Brit Awards 1992, where they made national headlines by firing blanks from a machine gun at the unsuspecting audience and causing chaos at the after show party.

Speaking of the after show party, here’s the Guardian’s description, from a piece on the “key fifty moments in the history of pop music”:

Bill Drummond did his best to shock, firing blanks from an automatic weapon over the heads of the crowd and later dumping a dead sheep with the message: “I died for ewe – bon appetit” tied around its waist at the entrance to one of the post-ceremony parties.

(Other British music ceremony moments of note include Fruitbat of Carter USM flattening Philip Schofield at Smash Hits awards circa 1991 and Jarvis Cocker flapping his bum at Michael Jackson during the Brits in 1996. Hurrah for irreverence.)