I’m feeling this space-themed music video after all of the recent space news and moon gazing.

The video was directed by Erik Wernquist and the photography is credited to “NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio,” which kinda makes me want to track down the original sources.

Link via Synesthesia

Hits two different nostalgia buttons at the same time.

For some reason I decided to listen to this song on repeat on the subway this morning. There are two spoken audio samples that are always kind of in the back of my mind: “You are something that the whole world is doing” and “a culture is no better than its woods.”

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After watching this (unsurprisingly) spectacular OK Go video I was struggling to remember the name of a similar contrivance in Vik Muniz’s Rebus exhibition. I found it, along with lots of helpful commentary over at Chris Devers’s blog.

A few things that struck me:

• This is not your typical Rube Goldberg machine – it’s messy, destructive and the band members stand in as “props that can reposition themselves” (as Chris nicely puts it).
• The open letter seems to have worked. Even recording industry lawyers are apparently powerless to this kind of strategic bad publicity.
• On the other hand, the last few seconds of this video indicate some kind of compromise on the part of the band. It pushes this music video into the direction of “novelty viral advertising.”

All that said, I’m happy this exists. I’m also happy the marching band version exists and glad the video embedding issue has been set aside for now.

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