Internet Art

It's been ages since I last wrote here. Apologies; life's been busy with school, job-hunting, cooking, and trying to enjoy the last bit of college. For the next month or two, I'll probably use this primarily as a place for sharing enjoyable things I find on the internet.

Here are some of my favorite finds from the past couple weeks:

OK Go always has great videos. They make me happy.

My high school choir sang a song or two by Eric Whitacre, and he is one of my favorite contemporary composers. His opera electronica Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings is something I've been dying to see. However, I recently became aware of another extremely cool project of his: Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir. Most recent video here:

After seeing this, a friend showed me this video, which has another great example of making internet art:

Sometimes, I am completely enamored with technology.

That's all for now. I'll try to be more disciplined about sharing tidbits here and there. No more months of hiatus.

Oh, and my Flickr page has been updated, too, with a few photos from spring break. Now that the weather's nice, I anticipate taking more photos as well.

Perspective

This video is beautifully done. A map that begins in the Himalayas of Tibet and extends to the limits of the known universe.

It's interesting to me for a few reasons. First of all, the notion that we can relatively easily map the entire known universe - 13.7 billion light years from earth - is pretty astounding. The idea seems to be putting into perspective the place of humans in the cosmos, yet I wonder if this is the best way to do that. Sitting in my bedroom with my 13-inch laptop screen makes it difficult to wrap my head around the measurements of space and time that are presented in the video. For me, standing on a beach looking out at the ocean makes me feel smaller than this video does. The video is useful for the quantitative-minded, and it does provide an occasion for thought. It seems, however, that putting things in this perspective will serve to fuel further exploration of the "limits of the universe." How far is too far? To what extent should uncovering the secrets of the universe be our priority? I am impressed at the artistic representation of enormous amounts of data, and I fully plan on investigating the Hayden Planetarium's Digital Universe Atlas, but still...

When I was done watching this video, I couldn't help feeling compelled to focus a little closer to home. I don't even feel like I always know myself very well; how can I expect to know about objects that are trillions of light years away? Far from feeling insignificant, I'm reminded that we are important - in this cosmic sphere of scientifically known terrain, our planet is isolated in many ways. Let's take care of it, and get to understand it so that we have the ability to protect it and its inhabitants.

What do you think?