Just came across these today and thought you might like them as much as I do: Satellite Collections by Jenny Odell.

“In all of my prints, I collect things that I’ve cut out from Google Satellite View– parking lots, silos, landflls, waste ponds. The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, reliably repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that read: people were here.” – from Odell’s artist statement

During this class, we assembled everyone’s work to create our Exquisite Collaboration. It looks great so far. We’re still waiting on a few files from people, but I’ll put up a separate blog post with a link to the final project when it is ready. We also had an informal critique where everyone spoke briefly about their work.

Continuing with our current assignment’s theme of using text as source material, I’d like to introduce you to the work of Kenneth Goldsmith. We’ve already come across some of Goldsmith’s work recently, as he is the creator of UBUWeb, the online archive of avant-garde poetry, sound art, and video where we watched the video about John Cage. In addition to his work as an archivist, Goldsmith is a poet and creative writing professor, and teaches a class called Uncreative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is interested in reinventing literature for the digital age, in part by applying the Conceptual art strategies of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Sol LeWitt, and Douglas Huebler. Some of Goldsmith’s creative works involve retyping newspapers, recording every word he says for a week (Soliloquy), and transribing radio broadcasts (Traffic).

“My books are better thought about than read. They’re insanely dull and unreadable; I mean, do you really want to sit down and read a year’s worth of weather reports or a transcription of the 1010 WINS traffic reports “on the ones” (every ten minutes) over the course of a twenty-four-hour period? I don’t. But they’re wonderful to talk about and think about, to dip in and out of, to hold, to have on your shelf. In fact, I say that I don’t have a readership, I have a thinkership. I guess this is why what I do is called “conceptual writing.” The idea is much more important than the product.” – Goldsmith, from an interview with Believer magazine

During this class we also looked at some examples of artists using texts as a kind of source material:

• Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout
• Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
• Ben Fry, Traces (visualizing the evolution of The Origin of Species)
• Stefanie Posavec, Writing Without Words
• Growing Up Edmund, from Indie Game: The Movie
• The video for Heart Made of Sound by Softlightes
• Born Magazine

Remember, with this project you can create your work in any way you like, you just need to use Dreamweaver to present the final work as a web page. We’ll look at Dreamweaver in more detail during the next two classes.

The due date for Assignment 2 has been extended until next class, so this class was mostly a chance for everyone to continue working on their animations for the Exquisite Collaboration.

During this class there was a brief introduction to HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. We learned how to “View Source” in a web browser to see the HTML code that is used to create any website. HTML code can be written in any plain-text editor, such as TextEdit on a Mac or Notepad on Windows, so you don’t need any special software to write code. I demonstrated how to configure TextEdit for working with plain-text, and how to create an HTML file on your computer that you can open in a web browser. We looked at some basic HTML tags such as <p> to create paragraphs, <b> and <i> to create bold and italic text, and <a> to create links. Some tags have attributes – for example, with an image tag (<img src=”puppy.jpg” />), the “src” attribute indicates the source of the image file. Note that tags can be nested, and that white space is not interpreted by the web browser, but can be used to organize your code. HTML is a markup language, which means that it is mostly used to “mark up” existing content. You can compare HTML tags to punctuation marks, which we use to give context and form to written language. HTML gives context and form to the content of a web page. If you’d like to learn more about HTML, HTML Source is a great place to get started.

At the end of this class we took a brief look at Dreamweaver, which we’ll be using to display our work from Assignment 3. Dreamweaver provides a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) interface for creating web pages. In other words, you can use the tools in Dreamweaver to visually build web pages, while the program writes the underlying HTML for you. Working with Dreamweaver is similar to working with Microsoft Word or other word-processing software, but we can create more complex interactivity and combine images and text in interesting ways.

In Class 8 we looked at the work of John Cage, avant-garde composer and poet – a very influential figure in music, poetry, and visual art. In a 1978 interview with Richard Kostelanetz, Cage discusses the techniques he uses in his works Writing Through Finnegans Wake and Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake. We are looking at this interview in preparation for our next assignment, Assignment 3, where we will use a text as the source material for a new artwork.

John Cage is perhaps best known for 4′33″, a composition which consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. When performed (here’s a performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra), the audience is meant to experience the ambient sounds of the setting as music. Cage also created chance or aleatoric music, such as prepared piano (here are a couple of videos).

Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake was created as part of Cage’s Roaratorio, a musical composition which uses Finnegans Wake as its source material. Finnegans Wake is itself an experimental modernist novel by James Joyce, another hugely influential figure in 20th century literature and art. The novel is full of puns, wordplay and made-up words, and uses a stream-of-consciousness writing style. Like Tom Phillips’s A Humument, which we looked at last class, Writing Through Finnegans Wake creates a new narrative by navigating an existing text.

Writing Through Finnegans Wake might also be thought of as an example of Conceptual art. In the words of Sol LeWitt, “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

As we work on our second project, a key point I keep referring back to in class is that the database – a system of components that can be organized in different ways to create meaning – is an important form in new media. Lev Manovich notes that “many new media objects do not tell stories; they do not have a beginning or end; in fact they, they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other.” He refers to the database as “a new way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world,” and proposes that “creating a work in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database” (from The Language of New Media).

During this class, we looked at some examples of non-digital systems which use a database-like structure, such as Magnetic Poetry, Scott McCloud’s 5 Card Nancy, and Endless Landscape toys. You might also think of euro-style board game tiles such as Settlers of Catan and Carcassone as examples of these kinds of systems. Canadian avant-garde poet bpNichol presents the keys on his typewriter as a kind of database in The Complete Works, a concrete poem.

We also looked at some examples of artists working with database-like systems, or creating narratives by navigating existing systems:

• Kelly Mark’s Letraset Drawings
• Christian Marclay and his work The Clock
• Jonathan Harris’s We Feel Fine and The Whale Hunt (TED Talk)
• Tom Phillips’s A Humument

A Humument is a great example of an artist creating a new work by “constructing an interface to a database”. By altering the original book (A Human Document), Tom Phillips reorganizes its data in an innovative way, uncovering unexpected narratives. The original book can be thought of as a database, while Phillips’s work takes the form of an interface, or a new way of navigating and interacting with the original work.

During this class, we looked at the origins of the exquisite corpse collaborative drawing game, including some of the original Surrealist drawings. The Surrealists were particularly interested in the subconscious, and came up with many techniques of exploring subconscious thought, including automatic writing, the cut-up technique, frottage, and collage. Wikipedia has a great list of Surrealist techniques. Think about how some of the commands and tools we use on our computers reflect the avant-garde strategies of collage and collaboration:

“Avant-garde aesthetic strategies became embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. The avant-garde became materialized in a computer. Digital cinema technology is a case in point. The avant-garde strategy of collage reemerged as a “cut and paste” command, the most basic operation one can perform on digital data. The idea of painting on film became embedded in paint functions of film editing software. The avant-garde move to combine animation, printed texts and live action footage is repeated in the convergence of animation, title generation, paint, compositing and editing systems into single all-in-one packages.” – Lev Manovich, from The Language of New Media

We also looked at some examples of how the exquisite corpse technique has been adapted for new media and the web:

• Corpsify
• A “Photoshop Tennis” variant
• The Exquisite Book (the “Preview & Process” page has great examples of SketchUp use)
• Monoface
• SITO’s Gridcosm and HyGrid

Besides Corpsify, here are some other examples of web-based collaborative drawing tools:

• Flockdraw
• WebCanvas
• SwarmSketch
• Scriblink

Finally, we created some paper exquisite corpse drawings in class, and I demonstrated how to go about slicing a Photoshop animation into three smaller ‘head’, ‘body’, and ‘feet’ animations for our exquisite corpse project. If you’d like to read more about collaboration on the web, check out Vague Terrain 17: Collaborative Spaces.

After our critique, I handed out Assignment 2, the Exquisite Collaboration project. For this project you’ll each create several animated GIF images, which we’ll combine into an interactive, animated “exquisite corpse”. To get an idea of how the final project will work, check out the Exquisite Collaboration from last year’s class.

Remember, in the spirit of the original Surrealists’ drawing game, your ‘head’ images don’t have to be heads; your ‘feet’ could be tails, clouds, flowerpots, or anything you wish. Your images can be either drawings or photo-based or some combination of both.

The project requires you to create six animated GIFs, each 500 pixels wide x 250 pixels high. You might find it easier to work on two 500 x 750 pixel images, and then crop each into 3 images. Don’t forget about the two 500 x 750 background images as well – these don’t have to be animated. The animations for this project should be short loops, they do not have to be particularly complex. You are welcome to make extra images if you find time!

If you each make 8 images, how many possible combinations will the creature have? The time-based nature of animation adds additional variation and complexity – animations with different frame rates will not always line up the same way.

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.” – Italo Calvino, from Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Geeks in the Gallery is a three-part interview (1, 2, 3) with Tom Moody and Michael Bell-Smith, two artists who have worked extensively with animated GIFs and other ‘low tech’ digital art. Tom Moody is an artist, musician and art critic who often makes use of older digital imaging software such as MS Paint. Michael Bell-Smith draws on the aesthetics of old video games and cartoons in works such as Up and Away, Return To Forever, and Action Hack Series. He is also the creator of Subterranean House (oonce-oonce.com).

Tom Moody: “Animated GIFs have evolved over the last several years into a kind of ubiquitous “mini-cinema,” entirely native to the personal computer and the World Wide Web. Almost anyone can make one and almost every browser will read them. In other words, no YouTube compression, no wait time, no subscriptions or proprietary formats to view, and they can be made in the most elementary and cheap imaging programs (free if you search for open source). GIFs are the purest expression of the democratic web and along with JPEGs and PNGs comprise its most authentic visual language.” – from his article Psychotronic GIFs.

Michael Bell-Smith: “I don’t think I’m entirely anti-narrative. I like to play with gestures of narrative (change, conflict, progression) without necessarily engaging in its structure and the pleasure that comes from it. I like to think I’m working in a tension between something pictoral, something narrative and something atmospheric, trying to create work that a viewer engages a bit differently from most time based media art.” – from the Geeks in the Gallery interview

During this class we looked at some examples of video artists working with loops:

Martin Arnold is best known for Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), a frenetic remix of film from old Andy Hardy movies in which a few frames of film are sampled, replayed and stretched into extended sequences. There are some clips of this project on YouTube: 1 (above), 2, 3. Passage À L’Acte uses a similar technique.

In works such as La Ronde and Momentum, Montreal artist Bettina Hoffman creates video loops where a camera continuously arcs around a group of people who are perfectly still. This mechanism allows the viewer to examine these awkwardly frozen social situations in minute detail, working out relationships between the characters in each scene and imagining what has happened or is about to happen.

Think about how both of these video artists use loops and repetition to focus our attention on otherwise ordinary moments, creating a sense of tension and unease, and drawing attention to the conventions and constraints of cinema.

We also looked at Marco Brambilla’s Civilization and Continue. Many of Brambilla’s video projects make use of loops. Brambilla directed the 1993 Hollywood blockbuster Demolition Man before turning his attention to video and installation art.

“The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. In consequence we should not only consider what is shown, but also that which is not shown. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that which is most interesting to consider.” – Martin Arnold

Photography website Photojojo has a great tutorial about how to make your own cinemagraphs, the “photos that move” that we looked at last week. Even if you aren’t working with photos for your animation project, you might find the tutorial useful – it includes details about how to import a video file into Photoshop, using a layer mask as part of your animation, and working with GIF’s limited colour palette.

The cinemagraph above is by Tilen Sepic – check out the blog youhavetostartsomewhere for more.

Class 3 was a work class for our loop project. Here are a couple of looping animated GIFs I made as examples for class. The first is hand-drawn, while the second uses photographs:

A few different types of loops:

Infinite Loops
An infinite loop is “a sequence of instructions in a computer program which loops endlessly, either due to the loop having no terminating condition or having one that can never be met.” Here is an example video of someone creating a simple infinite loop using the BASIC programming language.

Feedback Loops
A feedback loop is “a circular causal process whereby some proportion of a system’s output is returned (fed back) to the input. This is often used to control the dynamic behavior of the system… A control system usually has input and output to the system; when the output of the system is fed back into the system as part of its input, it is called the feedback.” Here is a video of someone creating a video feedback loop by pointing a video camera at the screen it is connected to. We demonstrated this in class using a webcam.

Strange Loops
“A strange loop arises when, by moving up or down through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started. Strange loops may involve self-reference and paradox. The concept of a strange loop was proposed and extensively discussed by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and is further elaborated in Hofstadter’s book I Am a Strange Loop, which appeared in 2007.” You might think of the work of M.C. Escher as visualizing strange loops. Another example is Duane Michals’s photo series Things Are Queer.

This class continued our exploration of the loop as a form for artmaking. We talked a little about the importance of loops in early motion picture technology, including the work of Eadweard Muybridge, and optical toys such as zoetropes and thaumatropes. Loops are also important in computer programming. We also looked at some more examples of the loop as a form in new media art and animation:

• Ben Fry’s Distellamaps (visualizing the loops in computer code)
• Cory Arcangel’s Permanent Vacation (more images) (“Two unattended computers send endlessly bouncing out-of-office auto-responses to each other”)
• Zoomquilt and Zoomquilt 2 (interactive loop art)
• BLU’s animated graffiti video, MUTO

We also learned a little more about working with animation in Photoshop, including working with photographic sources. Some things to remember:

• It’s easy to get mixed up when working with both layers and animation frames, particularly when trying to add layers to an existing animation. I’d suggest creating and organizing your artwork on different layers before starting to add frames and animate your work. Remember, if you want two elements of your artwork to move independently of each other, they need to be drawn on different layers.
• We looked at using Tween to have Photoshop generate the “in-between” frames of your animation. If you are going to use Tween to generate part of your animation, I’d suggest doing this first after drawing your layers, before you start tweaking individual animation frames.
• Each Layer will either be visible or hidden in each frame of your animation. Each layer can also have a different position or opacity in each frame, which means that you can create an animation using just a few layers.
• Did Photoshop unexpectedly apply a change to all your animation frames? Keep an eye on the “Propagate Frame 1″ and “New Layers Visible in All Frames” settings.
• You can adjust the thumbnail size on the Layers and Animation palettes to make it easier to see what is on each layer or frame.
• To create an animated GIF file, use the Save for Web & Devices menu option, and choose GIF format.
• Save your work often! Also, remember to backup your work on your flash drive.

Lev Manovich is a new media artist and theorist, and teaches at the University of California. In his book The Language of New Media, Manovich asks: What is new media? By examining new media in the context of avant-garde film and other recent visual and cultural history, Manovich develops insightful theories about how new media works and what makes it different. The book is a great introduction to new media art, and is very useful for anyone who uses computers creatively.

From Manovich’s self-interview about The Language of New Media:

Q. What is new media?

A: The short answer: read the book. More seriously, we can define new media as new cultural forms, which depend on computers for presentation and distribution: Web sites, virtual worlds, virtual reality, multimedia, computer games, computer animation. My book investigates continuities and discontinuities between these new forms and the old ones. What are the ways in which new media relies on older cultural languages and what are the ways in which it breaks with them? [...]

Manovich is especially interested in structures and forms which are unique to new media, such as the database and the interface. In this class, we’ll be working with some of these structures – our first assignment deals with loops, and for our second assignment we will look at the database as an aesthetic form.

Lev Manovich’s website is manovich.net. He has made the entire book available as a PDF: The Language of New Media.

GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is an image format that is useful for compressing images to small sizes by limiting the number of colours. GIF is an older format, and is gradually being replaced by PNG. However, unlike PNGs, GIFs can be used to create animated images. Animated GIFs can be created in Photoshop or other software. They are popular as a way of presenting animation on the web in a way that does not require video or any specialized plugins.

Note that when you open an animated GIF file in Mac OS X, the Preview software will display each frame as a separate image instead of playing the animation. To properly preview an animated GIF file on your computer, try dragging the file to a web browser such as Safari, Firefox or Chrome.

During our first class, we looked at some examples of innovative animated GIFs:

• The Animated GIF Appreciation Society (a blog with lots of examples of GIFs used as web memes)
• Blue Ball Machine (an animated GIF that tiles seamlessly to create a continuous animation)
• Reaching for the Out of Reach (wobbly 3D effect from old stereo photos)
• Cinemagraphs (more here) (professionally produced “cinematic photographs”)
• If We Don’t, Remember Me (a blog of “living movie stills”)

Kelli Marshall has written an interesting essay about animated GIFs and the history of cinema: Animated GIFs, Cinemagraphs, and Our Return to Early Cinema.

Last semester, we learned a lot about how to use Photoshop and other digital imaging software to create and manipulate digital images. In Introductory Digital Imaging II, we’ll learn to apply these skills to time-based and interactive media such as animation, video, and web-based art.

We will also spend more time discussing what makes digital art different from other kinds of art, including forms and structures that are especially appropriate to digital artmaking. One of these structures is the loop, which is important not only in cinema and video, but also in computer programming. For Assignment 1, we’ll use Photoshop to create a looping animation.

During our first class, we looked at some examples of the loop as a structure in new media art:

• Tango by Zbigniew Rybczyński (more information, and an essay)
• 787 Cliparts by Oliver Laric
• Animated GIF Model by Olia Lialina
• Hypertemporality Animations by Peter Baldes (including Olia Lialina reference)
• Body Language Sequences by Hugo Heyrman
• selfcontrolfreak by Olivier Otten

In this class there was also an introduction to creating animation in Photoshop, using the Animation palette. Photoshop lets you create frame-by-frame animation by drawing the parts of your animation in different layers, and then adjusting the visibility of your layers to control what is shown in each frame of the animation. Each layer can also have a different position and opacity in each animation frame. We’ll look at this in more detail in our next class.

Welcome to VART 2601: Introductory Digital Imaging II! We’ll continue to use this class website for the second part of the course. Hope you all had a great break!

As before, assignments and other documents can be downloaded using the Course Documents links in the left side bar. I’ve posted the 2601 Class Outline, and Assignment 1.

Note that on this class website, VART 2600 stuff shows up with blue links, and VART 2601 stuff uses green links.

During this class we looked at some examples of artists whose work relates to Assignment 6, the Avatar project.

Many artists use pseudonyms, or create alternate identities for themselves. Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy is a well-known example; her name is a pun on the French phrase “Eros, c’est la vie”. Duchamp also famously signed his Fountain readymade “R. Mutt”. Contemporary examples of artists’ alter egos include Netochka Nezvanova, Darko Maver, Margaret Penney’s DiaryU project, and Mouchette.org.

In class we watched the Art 21 video of Cindy Sherman, who examines stereotypes and media representation of women in photographic self-portaits such as her Untitled Film Stills. Toronto artist Rafael Goldchain uses similar strategies in his photo series Familial Ground, in which he disguises himself as his ancestors.

Though the ability to participate anonymously on by the web may be changing, anonymity has been a theme of many internet artworks and projects. A notable example is PostSecret, “an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.”

Other examples of artists and artworks examining digital identity include Aram Bartholl’s Google Portrait Series and WoW workshops, Nicholas Felton’s Personal Annual Reports, and the collaborative projects self.detach and OneAvatar.

This excellent video interview with Jon Rafman about his Kool-Aid Man in Second Life project touches on many aspects of digital identity, web subcultures, and being an artist in the digital age. Be forewarned that parts of the video are NSFW (not safe for work), as the artist and interviewer wander through the rampantly anarchic virtual world of Second Life.

In this class we critiqued everyone’s work for Assignment 5 (the map project). I thought this project went really well, and the critiques provoked some good discussion. Now that the new printer is up and running, we’ll try printing everyone’s work and displaying it in the hallway in the Arts & Science building.

While we’re looking at map-related art, I thought some of you might enjoy Brendan Dawes’s Cinema Redux project:

“Cinema Redux creates a single visual distillation of an entire movie; each row represents one minute of film time, comprised of 60 frames, each taken at one second intervals. The result is a unique fingerprint of an entire movie, born from taking many moments spread across time and bringing all of them together in one single moment to create something new.”

Note that the number of frames in each row is not arbitrary, but represents one minute of film. You might think of any artwork as being composed of various small decisions; when there are particular reasons behind these small decisions, the work seems more considered, thoughtful, and stronger.

Check out more of Dawes’s work on his website, brendandawes.com.

During this class we started Assignment 6, which involves working with the concept of an avatar, a graphical representation of a computer user or alter ego. We are also about to finish Assignment 5, the Map project.

I handed out a short reading, “On Cartography” by Lize Mogel, which is from the Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism catalogue that I brought to class. Mogel observes that the “enormous amount of recent cultural production involving maps and mapping is reaching a critical mass,” and suggests that this is because changes in technology and society make maps, networks and other non-linear visual representations more relevant:

“The absolute centrality of the internet to metropolitain citizens, saturation of electronic communication, and increased mobility have taught us to understand information as embodied in map/networked form, rather than through linear narratives.”

Mogel is an artist and creates reconfigured maps such as Mappa Mundi and Area of Detail.

In this class we looked at some examples of artists working with maps, geography, and place:

The body as map / the map as body:

• Nikki Rosato
• Eve Bailey – Map-Anatomy
• Annette Messager – Mes Tropheés (pdf)

Map as journal and memory:

• Denis Wood
• Marlene Creates
• Kim Dingle

Examining maps as a manifestation or subversion of power:

• Peter Dykhuis
• William Kentridge – Tapestries
• Paula Scher
• Susan Stockwell

Maps of imaginary worlds:

• Sohei Nishino – i-Land
• Ross Racine

Handmade maps:

• Marlena Zuber
• Leah Evans
• Stephen Walter

Reworked / hacked maps:

• Damon Zucconi – Fata Morgana
• Armelle Caron
• Aram Bartholl – Map
• Helmut Smits – Dead Pixel in Google Earth
• Animals on the Underground

Maps as material:

• Nina Katchadourian
• Matthew Cusick
• Shannon Rankin – Uncharted
• Elisabeth Lecourt

Mapping / travel as drawing or performance:

• Richard Long – A Line Made By Walking
• Jeremy Wood – Traverse Me
• Garvin Nolte – Crossroads

Evelyn Lambart’s The Impossible Map, a National Film Board film produced in 1947, is a fantastic introduction to the difficulty of translating 3D objects into 2D surfaces (and the fine art of producing maps from fresh produce). Check out the National Film Board website for other excellent examples of Canadian short films, documentaries, and animation, including classics such as Log Driver’s Waltz and Paddle to the Sea.

During this class, Halifax artist Peter Dykhuis visited us to talk about his work. Peter is in Corner Brook to install The Harmon Project, an installation with Gil McElroy at Grenfell Art Gallery. It’s great that he was able to visit at this time, since we’re working on a map project, and Peter’s work often involves cartography.

During this class we also looked at some examples of interesting and unusual maps, and watched The Impossible Map by Evelyn Lambart. I brought in two books about artists working with maps: You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, and Experimental Geography.

During Class 17 we took a look at everyone’s work for Assignment 4, the Pixel Art project. The variety of different media made this critique particularly surprising. It was great to see so many of you actively engaging in the critique with comments, questions and suggestions.

Here is the video I showed at the start of class:

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

If you enjoyed this, you should take a look at Richard Barnes’s series of photos titled Murmur.