Flash project: I was going to spend last week helping out Joana with a promo video for the FAZ Ideas in Portuguese contest. Everything was going to be shot outdoors, however progress was irritatingly slow due to the heavy rain that fell all week. We couldn’t get a break. So yesterday and in despair, we scrapped nearly everything and started over, shooting stop-motion indoors as the rain fell outside almost to the very end, when we managed to get a couple of shots outside again.

And somehow it worked.

If you can read Portuguese, please visit and vote for us!

A Short History of the GIF. I remember when I was a teenager ‘gifs’ was slang for digitized porno imagery (was this a portuguese thing or did the video authors gloss over that?). That this was followed by annoying Web 1.0 animations and banner ads didn’t do wonders to rehabilitate people’s view of the Graphics Interchange Format. That day only came a quarter of a century after the format’s introduction, when we got enough bandwidth to start doing all kinds of awesome things with it.

I wonder what goodness may come if we just insist on certain technologies rather than eagerly adopting shiny new things whenever they appear. Ideas Repository

Big news: I have dedicated Words and Thoughts in RGB to the Public Domain.

As with Life is Change, I waived all my rights to RGB through the CC0 Universal Dedication — it’s Free as in ‘Freedom’. This means the video is truly yours to use as you please. Downloads are available at Archive.org. Enjoy!

Recently I made the decision to dedicate a few of my older videos to the Public Domain. This meant getting formal permissions from the people who contributed to the making of those videos and a small amount of reediting to replace those bits that weren’t PD-kosher (i.e. stuff I used that had Creative Commons licenses).

Life is Change is the first of my videos to go full-blown Public Domain (through the CC0 Universal Dedication). Even though many web services encourage their use (and some don’t even allow you to check a Public Domain option) I am not at all interested in the common Creative Commons licenses, as I feel these encourage a ‘free-ish culture’ with strings attached. I believe your stuff should be either free or not free. Public Domain or Your Domain.

So enjoy Life is Change: Remix, redistribute, do whatever you want. I have made some downloads available at Archive.org. They’re yours.

Science news this week are all about the almost certain discovery of the Higgs Boson. From what I gather that’s big news, even if my understanding of particle physics is also in an infinitesimal scale, so I go with the explanation that the finding of the Higgs particle closes and vindicates the Standard Model of particle physics in pretty much the same way the discoveries of elements such as Gallium, Ytterbium or the noble gases in the late 19th century vindicated the atomic model and Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table.

However, I find myself in utter lack of awe at such discoveries. I think it’s sad all cutting-edge science nowadays seems to deal with the negative Powers of Ten, the infinitesimal, starting at nano and working its way down. It feels as if Mankind is retreating, into Earth, into tinier and tinier spaces. That’s not to say the study of the infinitesimal isn’t interesting and without awesomeness — just look up stuff on quantum levitation or Bose-Einstein condensates — but we also need to look at the stars — at the positive powers — for inspiration.

Hence The Voyagers by Penny Lane. Go watch it in silence. Let’s not retreat into tiny holes in the ground.

Synesthesia by Terry Timley (2009). A wonderfully surreal short film.

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.”