A Brief History of John Baldessari is probably the very best mini-documentary I’ve seen recently. Narrated by Tom Waits and directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the guys who made Catfish. This is not boring art.

Questions No One Knows the Answers to, by Chris Anderson and Andrew Park at TED Education, which seems like an interesting video education resource in the Khan Academy mold, even if the TED brand is getting a bit old (here’s one proof).

By the way, Chris Anderson (who I just found out is not the Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson) has a wonderful narrator voice. Not as good as Werner Herzog’s, but pretty close.

While exploring the farthest reaches of some external hard drive yesterday I found this b&w test render of the portuguese version of Change Your Habits Today. Somehow I like it more than the orange-cast original (or probably I just got bored of it). Naturally I’ve uploaded the find to Vimeo.

How Art Works? by Tymek Borowski and Pawel Sysiak. I really recommend you take twelve minutes to watch this to the end.

Art desperately needs a resurgence of ‘coarse’, earnest artists. Forty years of evolution of the least common denominators between conceptualism, the postmodernist outlook of history, the liberal markets and the academic tradition led to a vicious cycle of non-stop bullshitting in the art world, which fed both the speculators and the dandies who brought about the twin curses of ‘creative industries’ and hipsterism — which in turn eventually led to this guy.

So let’s ‎”try to communicate as simply and directly as possible, even if it sounds stupid.”

Robot Readable World is an interesting video made from recorded footage of computer vision sytems. Despite the fact these ‘behind the scenes’ images are actually generated for the benefit of the humans programming and debugging such systems, as computers don’t really ‘see’, I still find them somewhat creepy. To me, all look like Terminator-vision. (via Boing Boing)

Basil Wright and Harry Watt’s influential 1936 documentary Night Mail.

This 1968 German TV advert is quite something. Even if it’s easy to be nostalgic about yesteryear’s trash, I think this advert is beyond crazy and awesome for something aired on broadcast television. I’d love to hear whoever pitched this. (via Boing Boing [earlier])

Here’s a very short documentary about generative art. It’s also worth checking the rest of PBS Arts’ playlist, which contains short documentaries about other really contemporary art subjects. (via Boing Boing)

Here’s another video I’ve worked on recently — a short study about a local architectural landmark, the Miradouro hotel and restaurant, which is the highest spot in Porto (we don’t have many impressive or tall buildings around here). I did the camera work and the post-production for my architect friend Alexandra Areia, and I’m happy to report the video is one of the finalists at the creative video contest we submitted it to.

Tomorrow the first public showing of Damião* will take place at 6:30pm in the Teatro Nacional S. João, here in Porto. The short film is a ‘mockumentary’ about the watchman at an abandoned shopping mall. It is an adaptation of the play Damião das Chaves by Pedro Estorninho, who also plays the title character.

I’ve just finished a trailer. The song is Dandy by Carlos Gardel, and, despite what YouTube’s bot police tells me, it is very much in the public domain.

* If you don’t speak portuguese, do us a favor and please pronounce it ‘Damien’.