This week I experienced two remarkable combinations of music and the moving image.

Natures 3B from Quayola on Vimeo.

This evening I watched Nature — Mira Calix and Quayola’s audio visual piece which took video footage of flowers blowing in the wind and used motion tracking technology to generate music from the footage. As a concept it was interesting, unfortunately as music it was terrible. The beauty of the footage betrayed the folly of the concept: if a human were to compose music based on the beauty of flowers the way they moved in the breeze might feature, but wouldn’t be the basis of the entirety of the piece. The colour, form and memories triggered by the flowers would surely feature. Turning the flowers to a network of points modulating parameters reduced them to an interesting if psuedo-random system and the resultant synthesised music was predictably cold and pseudo random.

By contrast, a few days ago I had the pleasure to watch Manhatta, a black and white movie about Manhatten made in 1920 by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand and accompanied by a new soundtrack by the Cinematic Orchestra. Where Nature used machines to generate it’s soundtrack based on an algorithmic interpretation of the movement of flowers, Manhatta uses humans to generate it’s soundtrack based on the emotional impact of the moving image on the musicians. The result is infinitely more moving. The music adds emotion to the moving image, combining feelings of wonder, awe, fragility and insignificance — a uniquely human reaction to the images of the worlds most amazing city that cannot possibly be understood or rendered by an algorithm, no matter how clever.

Art is a human reaction to our world, not something that can be captured in an algorithm.

Second Life has benefited greatly from growing in popularity alongside video sharing services. Many people’s first glimpse of Second Life or a particular Second Life experience is through the lens of a YouTube video. When promoting real world brands in Second Life, videos of the Second Life experience that can be viewed by a wider audience on the web are often an important part of the campaign. Even for experienced residents like me, it’s often a video posted on New World Notes that inspires me to fire up the Second Life viewer to take a look at an amazing new build or experience.

The goal of the Carbon Goggles demo and tutorial videos was to make it clear what Carbon Goggles do and how to use them, but videos are also a great way to make the Carbon Goggles visualisations themselves available to a wider audience on the web. As well as being an ambient augmented reality application that allows Second Life residents to passively learn about real world carbon costs, Carbon Goggles can be used to quickly create images and videos that illustrate real world emissions.

If you annotate new objects with carbon emission data using Carbon Goggles, please consider recording some footage of the newly annotated objects and adding it to the Carbon Goggles vimeo group. I’ve added a vimeo badge to carbongoggles.org to show the newest videos. As well as allowing Carbon Goggles users to share the locations of annotated objects in Second Life, carbongoggles.org now shares visualisations of carbon emissions data to everyone on the web.