art

VHS generational loss experiment

James over at Cinemassacre undertook to find out how many times you could copy VHS footage before it became completely unwatchable. It’s not exactly a well-controlled experiment: He doesn’t report the equipment he used to do the copying or the kind of tape involved and, somewhat annoyingly, he does not actually report the number of clips he spliced together to make his 3-minute video. Determining at what point the noisy footage is “unwatchable” is also sort of arbitrary. Still, interesting to watch. I personally counted 63 generations before the footage decayed into meaningless audiovisual noise. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]

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Stunning hyperrealistic glass flower models at Harvard

Stunning hyperrealistic glass flower models at Harvard

In the late 19th century, when biologists and botanists from Harvard were sailing all over the world taking specimens of every living creature they could find and sending them back home for study, a very serious problem arose in the accurate preservation of those specimens. There was no refrigeration and no practical color photography, and fresh plant and animal specimens rapidly decayed into colorless blobs of mush in jars full of alcohol or formalin. So then-director of the Harvard Botanical museum George L. Goodale commissioned German father-and-son glass artists Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka to create photorealistic replicas of fresh specimens in solid glass. The Blaschkas would go on to spend the next 50 years creating more than 3,000 such models, which are still on display at Harvard today. It’s a thing not to be missed in your time on this Earth.

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Original Mars Attacks art in Makers Market

Original Mars Attacks art in Makers Market

Aw, man, this is almost too good to be true: Makers Market seller John Doffing, of Philadelphia, PA, has scored a license to reprint every card in Topps’ famous 1962 trading card series Mars Attacks. John’s company, LTL Prints, has a novel full-color print-on-demand process using environmentally friendly inks, at 1440 dpi, on a 10 mil self-adhesive “fabric paper” substrate that can be removed and repositioned over and over again. He’ll sell you any card in the series at your choice of six sizes ranging from one foot to six feet on the long edge, with prices starting at $15. He’s also selling complete sets at a steep discount over the per-print price.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan