Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Of narrative and animation

While I was surfing around on YouTube (I do it occasionally), I ran into animations of The Brothers McLeod. Besides Fuggy Fuggy, which is just funny to watch, I would like to highlight a short animation called Spamland#1.

You'll probably watch it once, watch it twice and on the fifth turn you'd still be thinking 'what the hell?'. Nevertheless, Spamland has got more than 500,000 views since October 2006 and has been featured on YouTube's front page several times. Trying to solve this phaenomenon, I found this post, which tries to transcribe the narrative of the story. Well, the narrative goes nowhere but there still is a sense of narrative. The Brothers McLeod have clearly taken data used to camouflage the spam and used it for a narrative source material. That leaves us the question - can you make a narrative out of everything and make it look appealing? I suppose.

There is also a nice interview with The Brothers McLeod at Cold Hard Flash.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

The algorithmically produced pseudo text produced for spam emails is not only very interesting from a computer science perspective, but it also comes across as extremely poetic, as it's a very peculiar use of language.

In other words, it's brilliant.