Art

Here at Native we do allow occasional time for The Coolest Thing We’ve Yet Seen Today.

Today’s is thru-you.com which showcases the work of Kutiman. It’s fairly self-explanatory, he’s creating original tunes by splicing together YouTube videos of people jamming with solo instruments.

The execution is the kind for which we’d reserve the word “awesome”. If you click the credits button to navigate the source material, you’ll realise he’s:

• not cheating here
• probably an amazingly patient person

None of this is by permission of the source creators it would seem. But these are mostly hobbyist musicians who’ve posted up their material for the joy of it. And I don’t think they’d mind being subject to such a splendid treatment. I mean, would you?

(For the link, cheers to Lessig and Colin Consterdine – it appears this has been online for a few weeks now. Techcrunch think he’s the first music “star” to be born on Twitter. Hard to disagree.)

This tag cloud was generated from Barack Obama’s speech and uploaded to the social photography site Flickr in double-quick time today. Here’s another.

Tag clouds have become a fascinating at-a-glance method of representing data. In this case, we see the words that Barack Obama has emphasised due to repetition.

Tag clouds began as a navigational aid for websites. Here’s a live example representing the content of the many thousands of pictures and photographs stored on Flickr itself. Each word is a link with the most common words given greater prominence.

I’m not sure which tool these used – if you want to generate your own, one such tool is Wordle.