Sun Boxes is an art project courtesy of Craig Colorusso. Each box in the array has a solar panel, a speaker and a chip inside with an embedded sound (a guitar tone of different length). The triggered sounds create a peaceful gradient of tones that mixes well with the ambient sounds of wherever they are installed. From this interview :

Each powered by solar panels, Sun Boxes’ twenty speakers contain PC boards with recorded guitar notes loaded and programmed to play continuously in a loop. Collectively, these guitar notes create a Bb chord. Because the loops are different in length, once the piece begins they continually overlap and the piece slowly evolves over time.

The results are oddly alluring. Please partake.

via Paige.

YouTube's having some problems with their Playlist Editor this week so this isn't the optimal order of things but that's alright.. Enjoy the playlist.

• 80s Keyboard Man - in a Karate gi. The jumping around is great, the music is great, the set is great but the real icing on the cake is the random spacemen lurking in the back.
• Watermelon Slingshot - pretty annoying clip from The Amazing Race in which a competitor gets absolutely demolished in the face with a watermelon. It is painful to watch but "they don't call it the amazing race for nothing!"
• Klingon Fukkireta - I told you this would be back. It's annoying, it's dumb and it's entrancing.
• AutoTune: The Backin Up Song - glad to see that this woman got the full Gregory Brothers autotune treatment. It's a surprisingly effective pop song.. love it when her voice cracks on the "Oh! Why did I need coffee now?"
• Comb Jellyfish - not a wildly amusing video per se but I can't get over this creature actually existing in nature. It is spellbinding.

BONUS

• Cache Rules Everything Around Me - a music video set to Girl Talk that uses nothing but animated gifs. The content is impressive but the fact that it's over nine minutes long is ridiculous. Pretty hard to get through all of it but a few scrub throughs will treat you right.
• Everything Chris Klein says in "The Legend of Chun Li" - we all knew this movie was horrible but it's hard to imagine it was this horrible.

Have a great weekend!

Untitled from tapir. One of many many great photos.

Via Pope St. Victor.

Erik Otto Current Works via Jeremy.

Night Two from Drew Levin via Kate.

I've had a long week and not much time for browsing. I've also got a ton of work to finish today before the weekend hits. With that in mind, prepare yourself for some large format blogging with little insight behind them. Hope you're cool with that because, frankly, you have no choice in the matter.

Take a moment to browse the portfolio of Nashville based design company Whiskey Theatre. I am particularly enjoying the product packaging, TV Book and music packaging. It's always nice to see such goodness coming from Nashville - great use of texture and type in loads of the work.

I will admit that my interest in what the Deftones are up to has majorly waned in the past few years but this video certainly caught my eye. Granted, the whole 'sexy ladies in water' angle of the video is a bit of a given that I'm going to enjoy it but ZF Films use of light leaks / flares, haphazard camera movement and the fact that it's underwater makes for a very dreamy piece of work. Feel free to mute the video if the song does nothing for you.. but certainly partake in the visual side of it.

I would also recommend watching the rest of the ZF Films works but it's safe to say that the Deftones video is the best example of what their doing. The rest have an element of chaos and intensity to them that can be a bit unsettling on the eyes (for me).

Via Courtney.

Ross gave me the heads up on this documentary Terminal Bar about a bar in NYC of the same name. From 1972 to 1982 Sheldon Nadelman was the bartender and documented tons of the patrons, other bartenders, bouncers, prostitutes, pimps and various other vagrants who were quite regular there. His son, Stefan Nadelman, has compiled those photographs and stories into the film. The trailer gives a good bit of insight of what to expect - some great stories and an awful lot of photo manipulation. Sometimes this works in a compelling way (zooming further into a photo) but otherwise it's a bit odd (giant mass of floating heads). Regardless of the techniques used to make the piece, the movie itself looks like it's a worthwhile viewing.

Check out this IFA 2010 Keynote and jump to the 32:00 minute for a rough demo of the forthcoming Google TV. I must admit that the integration of TV and web seems to be done extremely well - seamless even. I am sure the actual experience of it will be a little clunky at first but it's a promising demo.. now I'm actually curious to see more.

Via WAXY.

For the first time in a long time I have decided that instead of embracing the change of a piece of software that I use on very regular basis that I will rage against these changes and wrangle the changes back into something I can live with. I already told you about iTunes 109 that whips iTunes back into shape by adding some color and adjusting the system window buttons but when Kitsune Noir gave the heads up on this new Quicktime X inspired icon I knew I was going to embrace it wholeheartedly. The icon embraces the notion that CD's have gone by the wayside but embraces a more Apple / high-brow look.. light years better than what they supplied (and quite a bit better than a lot of other options).

I'm traveling from PDX to SFO today.. so no blog time (despite the delayed flight). Regardless, here are a few quick links to keep you company:

• TipTip jQuery Plugin - nice looking tooltip plugin for jQuery.
• 50 Year Storm - another photo blog of random and inspiring images. Well worth a weekly read at the very least.
• Jordan Butcher Design - some excellent works in this porfolio; particularly the latest Minus the Bear album OMNI.
• Klingon Fukkireta - you'll likely see this again on Friday but its one of those clips that is never going to wear out its welcome.

Nashville's Smallest Art Gallery just put up a new show from Jee Hoon Stark featuring thirty Matchbook Paintings. If ever there was a perfect canvas for displaying in the tiny gallery, this is it. You would think that tiny works of art scrawled on a matchbook wouldn't have much character to them as all the effort would be put into just drawing in such a small space but Stark has really gone the extra mile.. the pieces are both fun to look at and impressive that he was able to work so much into such a tiny space. Go check out the show, it looks to be a great one.

The other day Kate posted about the "Worlds First Album Cover" from Alex Steinweiss in 1939. I took one look at it and found it to be so appealing and incredibly well done that I immediately doubted that it was the first album cover. I mean, loads of vinyl was produced before 1939 so it stood to reason that there had to be album covers prior to that, no? And, indeed, there were "covers" but not in the style or sensibility that Steinweiss brought forth. My assumption of the cover being too good to be true was flat out wrong - my apologies to Kate for this mistake and my thanks to her for the heads up on him.. he is well worth diving a bit deeper into.

Despite just being a 23 years old he managed to convince his superiors at Columbia Records to take an album and give it a unique look; not just a prepackaged sleeve with the labels logo on it. Sales increased by 800% and it's safe to say that no one looked back as we still embrace his legacy today; even with mp3 albums. I highly suggest taking some time to read through his Wikipedia page, browse his phenomenal work and maybe even earmarking a new coffee table book of his works for future inspiration.

There is something calming about Things Organized Neatly; possibly the whole "a place for everything and everything in its place" mentality. A lot of the entries are digital manipulations and not actually impressive examples of proper organization but there are plenty of great executions to inspire you to get yourself organized as well.

Via Public School.

I've posted about New England Ruins before but the site has undergone a pretty massive redesign recently as well as posted some new photo essays of the abandoned building exploration that I'm a huge fan of. Photographer Rob Dobi certainly finds his way into some compelling spaces and manages to capture them in a way that actually does them justice... a feat that is rather difficult when trying to encapsulate something as intricate and powerful as a properly abandoned structure.

Gear up for your three day weekend.. maybe even take off work early today. You deserve it. Here's the playlist and the breakdown...

• Inception Cat - wait for it.... wait for it.... keep waiting.. you don't even need sound for this to be enjoyable.
• Executive Party - take a scene from Rollerball and put music from a previous scene over it. Result: Gold. via Zach.
• When Good Bananas Go Bad - the herky jerky movement here is so perfect.. I can't help but die laughing. Via Chris.
• Plane Propeller via Cell Phone - high speed propeller with low frame rate results in incredible effect. I don't know how this happens but it is phenomenal.
• Action Sequence - I wasn't sold on this until the final scene with the sword.. the build up to it is good but the payoff is the best.
• Coffee Lady Describes Incident - nothing that crazy here but you get the feeling that local news are putting this stuff out there as an attempt to create the next meme...
• Coffee Lady Remix - ... and it's totally working. This remix takes it to a whole new level. After the 1:05 mark you can stop watching.. as there is no need to get an update from the remixer on what he's been doing lately.

BONUS

• Baths - "Lovely Bloodflow" - great artsy music video taken from the highly enjoyable Baths record.
• Animated Short No. 1 - you don't see it coming.

Enjoy your weekend..

Given the speed of the Internet I have no doubt that you've already seen the latest Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis featuring Sean Penn. While I am sure Mr. Penn is on the joke, it really strikes me that he's legitimately perturbed. This is either a testament to his acting skills or to his ability to be true to his personality at all times.. either way, the results are hilarious.

Check out this collection of Foreign Horror Movie Posters. The results range from pleasantly artistic to questionably ridiculous and everything in between. I'm particularly fond of these Japanese posters for their level of absurdity.. so many great results it's hard to know where to even start.

Via Jeremy Okai.

These CSS3 buttons - called BonBon Buttons - are impressive to say the very least. Make sure you're using the latest browsing technology to get the full impact. They aren't production ready yet but it's pretty incredible to see the potential of the future of the web when it comes to markup. Anyone looking to realize the full potential of HTML5 should spend some time reading through this article on Custom Data Attributes - a fantastic way to supplement javascript behavior through inline markup. The potential here is pretty huge.