Videos

Bruce Ster­ling / trans­me­di­ale 2014 after­glow Open­ing Cer­e­mo­ny (by trans­me­di­ale)

Per­haps not Sterling’s great­est per­for­mance ever but he makes some inter­est­ing points towards the end about the need to argue with the sta­tus quo by build­ing alter­na­tives. And that the val­ue of these alter­na­tives can be in their rick­ety nature. A few choice quotes:

“It’s time to build alter­na­tive com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tems which reflect our own ethics and val­ues. We can do that.”

“In the tech art world we have to break with our long habit of liv­ing off oth­er people’s crumbs. We got­ta stop sleep­ing in the rich guy’s used car.”

“Now that com­mer­cial com­pu­ta­tion has become so slick and seduc­tive. Peo­ple for­get that tech­nol­o­gy and tech­nol­o­gy art are hard labour. It’s a tough scrab­ble when you’re real­ly on the elec­tron­ic fron­teer. And if it’s noth­ing but deca­dent point­ing and click­ing. How do you know if you’re any damn good? You’re good if you’re build­ing some­thing that peo­ple can use with some sense of decency.”

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[TAS] Super Mario World “Exe­cutes Arbi­trary Code” in 02:25.19 by Mas­ter­jun (by Masterjun3)

How this works is described in the pre­vi­ous post. The tool-assist­ed speedrun (TAS) phe­nom­e­non is pushed beyond its ini­tial inten­tions and morphs into some­thing alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent. What it exact­ly will become I’m not sure but I can imag­ine peo­ple tak­ing videogames and per­form­ing them as if they’re instru­ments of a kind.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

11 vs 100 Soc­cer Match.flv (by ice­ber­glau)

When I saw this post­ed by Doug I had the fol­low­ing to say:

Reminds me of how back in pri­ma­ry school the best foot­ball play­ers would always play against “the soup” — who­ev­er was left over. They would usu­al­ly have strength in num­bers to com­pen­sate for lack of skill. I of course was always part of the soup.

More weird foot­ball vari­ants in this MetaFil­ter post.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

The Cock­roach Beat­box — Greg Gage (by TED­E­d­u­ca­tion)

This video was shown at TEDx­Utrecht and then I got to see Gage do the same thing again live at TEDxBrus­sels a few days later.

What I find most inter­est­ing here is that Gage has turned the image of a cock­roach with one leg missing—something many peo­ple find discomforting—into a kind of mascot.

More work by Gage that involves ani­mals: play­ing music through a squid and a DIY remote con­trol roach.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Dog-walk­ing video (by Jhoosier42)

Thanks to Tri­cia for point­ing me to this one. A dog-walk­ing game which employs both a tread­mill and an instru­ment­ed leash. From the look of it, dog walk­ing has nev­er been this hard or tir­ing. I can imag­ine a game like this ful­fill­ing a real need in the large cities of Japan (there’s cat cafes too, after all). Some more thoughts on the coevo­lu­tion of man and domes­ti­cat­ed ani­mals such as cats and dogs can be found in this arti­cle from which the video was taken. 

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)