viz.

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

I’m not sure how this video was made, but it is really amazing to look at.

As rhetoric instructors spend more and more time teaching new media like video, I think this genre—the instructional video—will become an important skill for students in their own fields.

Here’s a description of the video:

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

via Make

Media Nipple has posted a collection of video clips from news, television shows, and other media on the theme of surveillance.

The post should be a good reference for anyone teaching surveillance and the ways in which it is depicted in popular culture.

Link (Warning: mildly NSFW.)

Mark Fiore has posted a satirical cartoon on the role of telecoms in the warrant-less wiretapping controversy. The cartoon stars Snuggly the Security Bear and CIA Director, General Michael Hayden.

via Boing Boing

CNET reports MIT has a new project that provides information about videos that have been removed from YouTube. From the article:

The site, an effort by the MIT Free Culture group, scans the most popular YouTube videos for the metadata Google inserts after a video has been taken down. YouTomb shows a list of recently removed videos (which you can’t actually view), who requested their removal, when they were taken down, and how long they were up beforehand.

This site should be a helpful resource for online video researchers, particularly those interested in copyright issues.

The ACLU is using this video to promote their campaign to collect signatures for a petition to stop a national ID and database program. The Real ID Act, passed by congress in 2005, would connect all state DMV databases into one interlinked database, “facilitating government tracking of Americans.”

Fox News Porn collects racy images and videos culled from Fox News and dresses them up on a pseudo-porn site with Girls-Gone-Wild-type disclaimers. (Be advised: the link above and parts of this post are probably not okay for work.)

This short film by Boca and Ryan Uhrich provides an introduction to typography while illustrating some of the possibilities of typographic videos.

When I teach writing, I like to occasionally give my students imitation exercises to point out the features of a particular text. Robot Chicken, Seth Green’s stop-motion-animation show, has provided a pretty funny video example of this practice (my favorite touch is when they bleep out the bad language). It would be interesting to assign this type of video exercise for students to familiarize them with video conventions.

See the video here.

I’m a big fan of Seth Stevenson’s advertising columns at Slate (he’s going on sabbatical and will be missed). On Monday he posted a new column, where he discusses readers’ submissions for the worst ads on TV. Like a therapist, Stevenson doesn’t so much agree with the contributors as he commiserates with the feelings of anger, betrayal, emptiness and loss directed at or prompted by these advertisements. One question that we can ask ourselves (and our students) is: Why do we care so much about ads? Take this McDonald’s ad for example: