Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (naturalsciences.org) for the newly built Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The exhibit celebrates our abstraction of nature’s infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process, and through our perceptions. It brings to light the similarity of patterns in our universe, across all scales of space and time.
10 feet wide and 90 feet in length, this sculptural ribbon winds through the five story atrium of the museum and is made of 3600 tiles of LCD glass. It runs on roughly 75 watts, less power than a laptop computer. Animations are created by independently varying the transparency of each piece of glass.
The content cycles through twenty programs, ranging from clouds to rain drops to colonies of bacteria to flocking birds to geese to cuttlefish skin to pulsating black holes. The animations were created through a combination of algorithmic software modeling of natural phenomena and compositing of actual footage.
This music video for “I Will Never Change” for electronic musician Benga by London-based studio US visualizes the waveform of the song via 960 records animated in stop-motion.
I’m loving this “Made by Hand” series, and this one about Cut Brooklyn is especially good.

The Old Man and the Sea in hand-drawn stop-motion. (via Brain Pickings)
Visit Everything is a Remix.
The song is Blues in Hoss Flat by Count Basie. Be sure to see Family Guy’s take on it.
