This is the first Swell Things guest post of year and I’m excited to present these collected bookmarks from my husband Jason Fletcher. As a Science Visualizer for the Charles Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science, Jason has his radar set on stunning digital visuals and animated shorts. Check out his blog, The Fulldome Blog, to read more about interests surrounding the planetarium community. Enjoy!
1. Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania is extremely high in soda and salt content. After animals die in the lake, their carcasses are preserved through calcification as they dry, resulting in petrified “mummies” of birds and bats. Photographer Nick Brandt visited the lake and captured a series of photos that features these petrified animals. The series is aptly titled Petrified.
2. Check out this music video where you can look around in 360° while traveling through a fractal zoom.
3. This is an incredibly ambitious 3D animation of a gigantic spacecraft inspired from the book Rendezvous with Rama from Arthur C. Clarke.
4. Imagine sitting on a swing that made it feel like you are floating through the stars…
5. Preliminary Study Toward 3D Printed Media Installations. “In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.” -Marshall McLuhan
6. This is one day’s observations from Himawari-8, a Japanese weather satellite, animated in a loop. It shows the western Pacific, Australia, and parts of Asia, Antarctica, and Alaska as they looked on one day in mid-2015. It covers 24 hours in 12 seconds – a time lapse factor of 7,200×.
7. Andy Cavatorta’s ‘The Dervishes’ is a robotic prototype that produces angelic-like sounds through spinning corrugated cylinders. Hear about his punk rock history and get inside his cyclone of sound.
8. Photographer Aydin Büyüktas’ background in film and visual effects really shows in Flatland, a cinematic series of drone footage digitally manipulated to create shots of Istanbul which seem to fold over on themselves. He must have loved the movie Inception.
9. Seed is a short project that the Aixsponza team created to try out fresh ideas and techniques. It is stunning!
10. SIM/NEBULA is an international collaboration of expressively futuristic visual poems, shaping the emergence of cybernetic organism counting down its time code in live acoustic waves of classical music.
