Wired News: Festival Takes Stock of Old Films A group of amateur filmmakers in Seattle has put together a festival that doesn’t require any filming, sets or actors. Instead, the Stockstock Film Festival showcases films made from stock footage – those old educational films, forgotten commercials and other random movies freely available in the public…
media matters
media archaeology – the Venus transit of 1882 – a return of what never was
Boing Boing: Collaboration across 120 years yields “oldest” movie ever The article is in Sky and Telescope. In 1882 David Peck Todd photographed a transit of Venus in California. Two astronomers have found the 147 negatives archived at Lick Observatory, just down the road here, and have turned them into a Quicktime movie. Another kind…
the economy of the gift and the concept of the virtual
Phil writes This is an interesting concept – the virtual gift. [Link to slashdot] Digitus1337 writes “Wired has an article up about a new online service known as ‘FunHi.’ You sign up and join a community, and give your fellows gifts, but as Wired has reported, ‘these are not ordinary gifts. They’re purely digital: little…
sense of place – matters of resolution and augmented reality
Phil and Peter have come across the California coastline site. High resolution aerial images, overlapped so you can travel the length of California’s coast. Tied to a map too. They were commenting on the effect of presence the site and images achieve. Not an effect of “being there” – but being able to see so…
the (new) archaeological intellectual
K. Kris Hirst runs the archaeology guide at about.com. As well as the usual stuff, she also has a series of curiously eclectic quotes on archaeological themes. The one posted yesterday, Quote 25, was Keith Bassett on the new intellectual, from an article in Environment and Planning 1996. A sound, if familiar, comment on the…
everyday mess
Philip has pointed me at blather – an extraordinary concatenation of fragments of text – the remains of thoughts, imputed conversation, remarks, ruminations, pontifications – the mess of everyday discourse … As Philip puts it Basically, you take a dictionary and throw out the definitions. Then you let everybody define the words themselves. Then make…