A British production house called Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratories created this fantastic video of a scientific experiment in which disembodied heads are used as musical instruments. Incredible compositing work.

The Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratories website has more info, including some production stills.

[via my colleague Chino, via my colleague Sam.]

Created anonymously by a group of professional animators in about 1929, the silent short Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure is a gleeful exploration of the penetrative arts. The four-and-a-half-minute short follows the travails of the uncomfortably well-endowed title character as he wanders a barren landscape in search of satisfaction. Along the way, he encounters a self-pleasuring maiden, various sexually aroused animals, a surprised husband, and a donkey-humping farmer, whom Harton challenges to a duel. A penis duel.

Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure is one of the earliest examples of an animated porn film. According to its Wikipedia page, several famous animators supposedly made the short for a private party in honor of the pioneering animator Winsor McCay, whose work greatly influenced Walt Disney and is still held in high esteem by Maurice Sendak, Chris Ware, and other luminaries.

This totally isn’t safe for work, so be careful.

I’m pretty sure the intertitles in this copy are not the originals.

The Wikipedia page includes this backstory quote from Disney animator Ward Kimball: “The first porno-cartoon was made in New York. It was called ‘Eveready Harton’ and was made in the late 20’s, silent, of course—by three studios. Each one did a section of it without telling the other studios what they were doing. Studio A finished the first part and gave the last drawing to Studio B. … Involved were Max Fleischer, Paul Terry and the Mutt and Jeff studio. … A couple of guys who were there [at the party] tell me the laughter almost blew the top off the hotel where they were screening it.”

This has gotten passed around a bit over the last few months, so forgive me if you’ve seen it already. It’s the incredible animated video for “Remind Me,” a 2002 track by Röyksopp, the brilliant electronic duo from Norway. In the past year I’ve listened to Röyksopp’s The Understanding more than any other album. They’re kind of like Air except more electronic and dancey—and not quite so French. They’re also a bit Boards of Canada-ish at times.

The guest singer on this track is Erlend Øye, one half of another great Norwegian group, the folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience. Do you like good music? Of course you do! So go buy the 2001 debut album by Kings of Convenience, Quiet Is the New Loud. It’s perfect.

Ourmedia.org is a potentially transformative website that launched a few months ago with the help of lots of impressive advisors, including the noted film archivist Rick Prelinger. (If you’re not familiar with Rick’s work, go to his site RIGHT NOW.) As the Ourmedia FAQ explains, “People who create video, music, photos, audio clips and other personal media can store their stuff for free on Ourmedia’s servers forever, as long as they’re willing to share their works with a global audience. … [Our] goal is to expose, advance and preserve digital creativity at the grassroots level. … We want to enable people anywhere in the world to tap into this rich repository of media and create image albums, movie and music jukeboxes and more.”

I haven’t spent much time on Ourmedia yet, because—warning!—it crashes Safari every time I try to load it. It seems to play well with Firefox, though, so yesterday I used that browser to do some poking around the site. One of the first things I unearthed was a fantastic and original music video for a song by Sam Bisbee, a guy I met a handful of times in the late ’80s or early ’90s when we were attending the same college. The video, which was directed by Tobias Perse, has an ingenious visual gimmick: It’s an animated video composed almost entirely of small photo prints, which accumulate swiftly into a big pile that’s occasionally refreshed by hands that reach into the frame. The song is called “You Are Here,” and it’s pretty catchy. I love this video. I’m going to link to the actual video file, instead of to the site itself, which should bypass the coding problem at Ourmedia that is causing Safari to crash. Here’s the video: