Daddy // James Franco's Art School Music Project

Nonsense is to fawn over celebrities for sake of fame.  Franco encapsulates a duality capable of capturing the sensibility of the hoi polloi, while undercutting it in quieter strokes with a corner-toungued sly smile and crossed eyeballs.  Daddy's a strikingly creative project that pushes the bounds of mash-up culture across history and media because it's songs based on aged poems based on even older songs with a painting customized to represent each track released alongside one another.  Bravo, Franco.  He's also got a project called Dutty Artz, with DJ Rupture & Kalup Linzy, an oddball spoken-word drag music artist who somehow infiltrated high fashion a couple years back.  Solid weirdness; the language that tickles my amygdala (and no, that's not below the belt). My respect grows on..

Pyroboard: Pyrotechnic 3D Sound Visualizer by Fysikshow

Fysikshow, Denmark's favorite physics education team, has taken the Rubin's tube, flammable gas piped through a line of holes to create a line of flames, and adapted it to a 2D plane.  Their invention, enticingly named The Pyroboard, emits a dance of fire synced to low base music- a VJ's hotdream.  It is outfitted with 2500 holes which light up when the audio pumped through the air hits a standing wave, which introduces a vibration into the air such that the flowrate of the gas peaks the height of the flames at points where the pressure is constant, called nodes.  The effect (best demonstrated at the 3:38 mark) is mesmerizing.

For more of these tasty Danish experiments: www.youtube.com/Fysikshow

Giuseppe Tartini // The Devil's Trill

The story behind "Devil's Trill" starts with a dream. Giuseppe Tartini allegedly told the French astronomer Jérôme Lalande that he dreamed that The Devil appeared to him and asked to be his servant. At the end of their lessons Tartini handed the devil his violin to test his skill—the devil immediately began to play with such virtuosity that Tartini felt his breath taken away. The complete story is told by Tartini himself in Lalande's Voyage d'un François en Italie (1765 - 66):

"One night, in the year 1713 I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and - I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the "Devil's Trill", but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument and have said farewell to music forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me."

I Am What I Am // Spiritualized

"Wanting to be someone else is a waste of who you are"
-CurtKobain

#easier.said

  "I AM WHAT I AM" | Spiritualized

G-Dragon // How they do in Korea

Black tie graffiti sets, wild cats, and neon braids.  Candy for the eye's sugar tooth.  that's One of a Kind.



Why so serious?  Catch a crayon and color up, kid.

Depeche Mode // My Joy

Freeze the text frames -> frustrations of the modern mind.

When XTC were The Dukes of Stratosphere // The Mole from the Ministry

Here is The Dukes of Stratosphere (XTC pseudonym)'s first single from 1985. 

It is is a random clip trip with homemade sets and outstandingly  cinematography choices at  at the 1:08, 1:32, and 1:56  marks.  The colorization at 2:54 is beautifully executed, pre-photoshop nevertheless.




The Dukes were  mentioned in the credits of XTC's 1986 album Skylarking, where they were thanked for the loan of their guitars.

Timothy Leary // When Psychadelics were Legal on Campus

 

The new Ph.D. stayed on at Berkeley as an assistant professor from 1950 to 1955. Despite his nascent professional success, his marriage was strained by multiple infidelities and mutual alcohol abuse. Marianne eventually committed suicide in 1955, leaving him to raise their son and daughter alone.[2] He described himself during this period as "an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis ... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots."[9][10]

A Berkeley colleague, Marv Freedman, later recalled, "Something had been stirred in him in terms of breaking out of being another cog in society..."

In 1965, Leary commented that he had "learned more about ... (his) brain and its possibilities ... [and] more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than ... in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research in psychology."

Leary was affiliated with the Harvard Center for Research in Personality under McClelland and oversaw the Harvard Psilocybin Project..  In 1963, Leary was terminated for failing to give his scheduled class lectures[11] against his position that he had fulfilled his teaching obligations in full. The decision to dismiss him may have been influenced by his role in the popularity of then-legal psychedelic substances among Harvard students and faculty members.

Leary argued that psychedelic substances, in proper doses and in a stable setting, could, under the guidance of psychologists, alter behavior in beneficial ways not easily attainable through regular therapy. His research focused on treating alcoholism and reforming criminals. Many of his research subjects told of profound mystical and spiritual experiences which they said permanently, and very positively, altered their lives. According to Leary's autobiography Flashbacks, after 300 professors, graduate students, writers and philosophers had taken LSD, 75% reported the experience as one of the most educational and revealing ones of their lives.

The Concord Prison Experiment was designed to evaluate the effects of psilocybin combined with psychotherapy on rehabilitation of released prisoners. After being guided through the psychedelic experience, or "trips," by Leary and his associates, 36 prisoners were reported to have repented and sworn to give up future criminal activity. Compared to the average recidivism rate of 60 percent for American prisoners in general, the recidivism rate for those involved in Leary's project dropped to 20 percent. The experimenters concluded that long-term reduction in overall criminal recidivism rates could be effected with a combination of psilocybin-assisted group psychotherapy (inside the prison) along with a comprehensive post-release follow-up support program modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous.

Leary and Alpert founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their research attracted so much public attention that many who wanted to participate in the experiments had to be turned away due to the high demand. 

"we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art."

"A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of spacetime dimensions, and of the ego or identity.... Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures"


[above excepts from Wikipedia]





Why?
Because every time you go to the supermarket buying your own food from that cold shelf, every time you take some meat from that disturbing fridge you fell there's something strange in our way of living. And because you have the same feeling every time you open the water tap, you take an elevator, you drive, you wait the green at a traffic light.
Because you need answers and because you don't know which are the right questions. Link

LCD Soundsystem // Disco Infiltrator

Breezeblocks Vid // Alt-J

If you like vids that have their way with your perception, twisting assumptions and folding belief over backwards onto its former form, this video for English rock band Alt-J will tickle with a rousing soundtrack to boot.

Sticks and Sails may Make my Bones // Theo Jansen's Strandbeest

wind-powered automatons #genius


Compilation from Strandbeest on Vimeo.

Solar Panel Roads

This couple has designed modular, pressure-sensitive LED solar panels that fit together with puzzle piece accuracy to form roads that can alert drivers to deer crossing up ahead while capturing the sun's energy and recycling it into charge ups for electric cars.  Hats off to this stellar eco-friendly innovation.

Amon Tobin - 3d Projection Mapping

just stunning.  what i wouldn't give to see this live..

The Evolution of Jamie Lidell

THEN 

                                                                             NOW