m!ndless

Paper animation

Jen Stark

Hit By A Bus: Mean Girls, Nip/Tuck, Final Destination, Lost, Felicity

Michael Bell-Smith

How Little We Know of Our Neighbours

"How Little We Know of Our Neighbours" is an experimental documentary about Britain's Mass Observation movement and its relationship to contemporary issues regarding surveillance, public self-disclosure, and privacy. Mass Observation was an eccentric social science enterprise founded in the late 1930's in England that combined surrealism with anthropology. The film traces the history of the movement from its inception as a progressive if naive "anthropology of ourselves" in the 1930's through its reincarnation as a civil spy unit during World War II and its eventual emergence as a market research firm in the 1950's. The film also looks at the multiple roles cameras have played in public space, starting in the 1880's, when the introduction of the hand-held camera brought photography out of the studio and into the street, and, for the first time, one could be photographed in public without knowledge or consent. Mass Observation's history is echoed in a range of present-day phenomena from police surveillance to web cams to reality television that points to ways in which our notions of privacy and self-definition have changed."

Showing at CAVS MIT
2/2 6:30 pm

Center for Advanced Visual Studies / MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning

265 Massachusetts Ave, 3rd Fl / Cambridge MA 02139 / 617 253 4415

Erik Olofsen

In Places Video

Domain

Amazing slideshow/survey of people's domains (their entertainment set-ups).
Guthrie Lonergan isn't for sissies.

Gaia Alessi & Richard Bradbury

A series of seven fireworks were set off within a metal container with a glass front, the dimensions of an average television set. When played back, the usual televisual distance is shattered, and the events appear to be happening inside the television itself, perhaps even the product of the television in breakdown.

To FIll the Sky

The Birdhouse Network

Using real-time Internet technology to observe and interpret the nesting behaviors of birds and promote understanding of their breeding biology.

Barn Owl Videos
Other Birds

Guthrie Lonergan

"While searching for more VHS intro awesomeness on YouTube, I ran into a billion Myspace intro videos - people videotaping themselves addressing visitors to their page. It's really quite odd to see them separated from Myspace (they're on YouTube only so they can put them on their profiles, but you can still find them through searching.) I collected them into a playlist  You'll get the idea from the first couple of videos.

I really don't want to make fun of these people, and there's really nothing shocking about them, they're incredibly normal people... But in some of them I sense this sort of awkwardness (?) that they have dealing with the Internet. These are very un-nerdy people making their own webpages, telling you to leave "picture comments," and pointing in the direction of where the "send message" button is on the page... I'm still trying to figure out what's going on here. Anyway, the videos are fun!"

Playlist: Myspace Intros

Abe Linkoln

"Made this video tonight about Isabelle Dinoire,
the french woman that had a face transplant and
made her first public appearance yesterday."

-Abe 02/07/06

movie

comments

something totally different

The Beauty Academy of Kabul

A group of American hairdressers head to Afghanistan to open the country's first post-Taliban beauty school. (Funded in part by beauty-industry main stays: Vogue, Clairol, M.A.C.)

The Beauty Academy of Kabul