F. Sean Martin from Hatebreed came to the office and recorded 27 guitar riffs, of which we are posting one per week at 900bats.com.

Episode 01 – Moon, Episode 02 – Muybridge, Episode 03 – Venus, Episode 04 – Womb

Announcement
Photos of the opening ceremonies
Photos of the soup kitchen

Another music video with Justin Metros and the 900bats crew. Aesop Rock rapping in Jeremy Fish‘s van. Cage reading a comic book, with sunglasses on, in the dark. Had a world champion pizza margherita at Tony’s afterwards. It was delicious.

Video with Justin Metros for Dirty Ghosts. Check them out at SXSW 2011. We filled a room with the DynaFog II and shot $120 worth of lasers every which way. Took advantage of the rolling shutter problem on the Canon 5D Mark II and the 7D; Fired a variable speed rave DJ strobe at Allyson’s face and then played it back at 12fps instead of 24, which gave the slow rolling light fields rather than crazy flashing seizure blinkies. Burrito from Pancho Villa after the shoot. It was delicious.

24 hour van rental bomber run from SFO to Reno for Aesop‘s show with Rob Sonic and DJ Big Wiz. The nice fellas at Beach Hut Deli opened their store just for us in the middle of the night and stuffed us full of wonderous sandwiches, so we tried to pay them back by giving them their own 900bats series called “First Bite.”

I hold no sandwich eating candle to Dr. Robert Sonic.

Web series in which Jeremy Fish doesn’t shave and tells creepy stories about his paintings while smoking a pipe and reading vintage Playboy magazines.

When Jackson Pollock decided that day to drip paint all over a giant canvas, he let the medium speak for itself. David OReilly provides a similar outlet to the natural voice of the digital image through hastily rendered polygons, compressions artifacts, and trace elements of the interface.

He uses his digital tools to created animated short films, portraying stories that would work in any medium. A strained domestic relationship. A young man heading to the big city. An eight-legged red cat on a quest to find his parents. That character, known as Octocat, became an accidental viral hit. An Obama-like blank slate character on which to project your hopes and dreams.

Whether it’s these finely observed portrayals of relationship and emotion, or his more abstract endeavors like the hauntingly peaceful looped animation “Black Lake” (a collaboration with Jon Klassen) and the open source head of Walt Disney, I can’t wait to see what else comes out of this low risk, high reward, one man animation studio in the top floor of this crapped on, tagged over, unlocked apartment building in Berlin.

Read more in the April issue of Juxtapoz Magazine.

Aaron Koblin conceives of and programs art collection systems, creating cohesive works from large groups of unknowing collaborators. He uses their hands to draw and their voices to sing, and pays them pennies for it. The result is a fascinating composite image of who we are, how we interact with each other anonymously, and where the future of labor and collaboration may be headed.

In “The Sheep Market”, he used Amazon Turk (an online distributed labor system for small tasks which require human intelligence), and a custom built drawing tool to create a herd of 10,000 unique sheep. He later used a similar system to forge a $100 Bill.

As a technologist, he collaborated with Director James Frost to shoot a video for Radiohead’s single “House of Cards” – without using cameras. The video was captured using depth finding lasers and the plotted points were released online as a free-to-use data set.

Read more in the March issue of Juxtapoz Magazine.

A few weeks ago I snuck into YouTube headquarters near San Francisco to scam an amazing free lunch of roasted squash, goat cheese salad, and an epic peach pudding concoction. I happened to pull my tray up next to Jeben Berg, who holds the title of “Storyteller” at YouTube / Google. He makes sure that interesting things are happening at the world’s largest and most important video site. If Jeben holds true to the Google 80/20 rule, where 20% of your time is reserved for personal projects, his must be interior decorating; putting on office art shows and collaborating on murals with the likes of Alex Pardee and Skinner.

Read more in the February issue of Juxtapoz Magazine.