Earlier in the week I saw micro.blogger Dan Cohen’s newsletter: Humane Ingenuity 36: 15% Faster which linked to DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Deformin’ in the Rain: How (and Why) to Break a Classic Film

Dan said:

Jason Mittell provides an extremely creative, occasionally bizarre, frequently hilarious, and ultimately rather helpful “inventory of deformative practices” to uncover hidden layers of meaning in media.

The article provides a pile of great gifs and distorted videos.

I’ve played around with this sort of thing before montages, gifsets and the like. Mostly DS106 inspired.

One idea I’d kept playing with is layering of images. My plan had been to layer a sequence into a movie, I’d never really got it going smoothly. I mostly just run a photo set through a script to get 1000s of images and choose a few interesting ones.

I usually use a few commandline tools for this, imagemagick & ffmpeg but there was a rather nice idea of using the StarStaX app an application for Star Trail Photography. I loaded it up with 90 odd jpgs images from a walk and merged them. I then stitched them together with ffmpeg and added some audio “Mysterious Ethereal Song” by theojt :

Not exactly a work of art but fun, I also learnt how to fade a video with ffmpeg which might be useful.

Lovely morning at Ardinning, arrived around 8. A hint of mist and a smattering of very light frost. No wind, loch like a mirror. Lots of birds singing. Few roe about before more people arrived. A few toads in the loch, looked like males awaiting the bigger females. A pair of dabchicks chattering. Larks and lapwings.

Every so often I come back to this idea of posting sets of rather random links. I love seeing them pop up on my on this day page. For organisation and discoverability it might be better to post links separately. Mostly in pinboard too.

I checked how many posts I had tagged lifeinlinks and that makes this one number 40.

Featured image, some branches against a blue sky today. convert branches.jpg -scale 900x -colorspace Gray -ordered-dither h4x4a branches.png

Museo is a visual search engine that connects you with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rijksmuseum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the New York Public Library Digital Collection Every image you find here is in the public domain and completely free to use, although crediting the source institution is recommended!

from: Museo

This looks like another pupil friendly source of images. I’ve added this to the short set on my classes’ links page.