Man Ray was one of the leading artists of the avant garde of 1920s and 1930s Paris. A key figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements, his works spanned various media, including film. He was a leading exponent of the Cinéma Pur, or “Pure Cinema,” which rejected such “bourgeois” conceits as character, setting and plot.

It’s not the first timelapse video of Venice, and it certainly won’t be the last. You can bank on that. But what distinguishes this clip from the others is its continual focus on the canals that make Venice, Venice. Gives this video three minutes and it will give you a full day in the life of Venetian waterways.

Last Friday, we posted Saul Bass’ Why Man Creates. For another short film which drew Academy recognition by using animation to illuminate basic human impulses, you could do worse than Disney’s Reason and Emotion.

Several weeks back, Colin Marshall wondered whether Pink Floyd’s 1972 concert among the ruins of Pompeii (watch it here) provided some inspiration for Rob Reiner’s 1984 satirical film, This is Spinal Tap.

If you’re getting ready to start yet another work week, let us give you some food for thought.
12 years ago, Daniel Suelo walked into a phone booth, left his only money there ($30), and hasn’t touched any since — no cash, no loans, no credit cards, no bank accounts, no welfare payments – nada.

Ever since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) went online in 2008, physicists have been conducting experiments, hoping to finally prove or disprove the existence of The God Particle, otherwise known as the Higgs Boson.

When the Roland TR-808 rhythm machine first came out in late 1980 most musicians were not impressed. It was a drum machine that didn’t sound like drums, with a handclap feature that didn’t sound like hands clapping. One reviewer said the machine sounded like marching anteaters.

Matteo — they’re a band from Salt Lake City that spent years “meandering through Chinese street markets and mountains,” gathering “a hearty collection of Chinese traditional instruments,” and then incorporating their sounds into their own brand of american indie-folk music.

Maybe you already had a fascination with Saul Bass’ celebrated movie title sequences, or maybe you gained one from yesterday’s post about the current designers he’s inspired.

In this new video from TED Education, teacher and author Jonathan Bergmann uses colorful analogies to help us visualize the scale of the atom and its nucleus. Bergmann is a pioneer of the “Flipped Classroom” teaching method, which inverts the traditional educational model of classroom lectures followed by homework.