Sadie Lou

Music video manipulation is on the up and up.

In addition to The Arcade Fire’s “Black Mirror” video, which invites viewers to manipulate the sound (hear Win Butler sing…or don’t—it’s up to you!), and the band’s video for “Neon Bible,” where viewers control all the action through the click of a mouse, the recent release of the music video for Radiohead’s song “House of Cards” also calls for audience participation. Because it was filmed using special 3D plotting technologies rather than cameras and lights, viewers are able to create their own versions of the video simply by playing with and manipulating the code:

Also recent, The Breeders’ “Walk It Off” video gives viewers the option of changing the perspective of real-time footage. It’s pretty cool:

Worldly dimensions—who knew there were so many? A little lesson in physics, from Imagining The Tenth Dimension:

(via)

School officially starts on September 1st, which means many of you East Coasters will soon be making the drive up (or down) from your respective homes. (Or, if you’re a first-year and have parents like mine, you—and all your stuff—will be traveling by mini-van halfway across the country.)

Whatever your travel plans, GOOD Magazine has its own to match, in the form of an interactive map/slide show charting “our history’s greatest journeys, from Magellan to Kerouac.” The feature’s called Wanderlust, and the map of trips is pretty eclectic:

See also GOOD‘s blog post concerning controversial map design.

Attention current and incoming Sarah Lawrence students: the moment you’ve been waiting for all summer is finally here—the Orientation 2008 schedule is now available to download!

In order to view it, simply log onto MySLC and click on the Orientation Page link, located beneath the “New Students” header (it’s on the right side of the page). This will take you to a page mostly designed for new students (if you haven’t already, all you incoming first-years are encouraged to explore it); you can find the Orientation 2008 schedule beneath the “Orientation Downloads” header (again, on the right side of the page).

I don’t want to give too much away, but I can guarantee everyone’s favorite “sexpert” David Moyer will be back, SLC’s perennial favorite film The Princess Bride will be screened, and Orientation Cabaret will, yet again, introduce everyone to the immense talent our school has to offer (shameless plug: this year, it’s being hosted by us fun-loving Sadie Lou types). Oh, and some guy named Frank Warren is scheduled to appear…

Update: For those undergrads pining to get a head start on choosing classes, the 2008-2009 course catalogue is also available, as is the preliminary course schedule (available on MySLC, under the “Academics” tab). Graduate courses can be found on the SLC website, within each program of study.

By now, you’ve probably heard of Muxtape, but in case you haven’t, let me fill you in: it’s a web-based platform that allows users to create and share personalized playlists using streaming mp3s. In other words, it’s mix-tape making, but on a global scale, accessible by anyone and everyone.

Launched on March 25, 2008, Muxtape’s “goal is to redefine the mixtape on the internet as a model for music discovery and social interaction, and to do so in the most elegant way technology allows.” Users can access myriad playlists, sometimes even at random. In addition to its main feature, Muxtape also has a blog powered by Tumblr, where readers are linked to featured mix-tapes (or “muxtapes”) and, at times, web literature about the art of mix-tape making.

See also the Subtraction post about what could make Muxtape even better than it already is.

Update: Muxtape is currently unavailable due to some issues with the RIAA. The site’s administrators need to sort things out, but they promise the platform isn’t closed forever.

Today, Sadie Lou launches its newest section, the Online Archives.

Throughout the 2008-2009 school year, members of the Sadie Lou Team will be working in conjunction with Abby Lester, College Archivist, to make selections from the Archives available for public viewing.

The Archives currently contain pieces from student journals and magazines The Keynote, Dimensions, and The Little Jackie Paper. Some of these articles were written as far back as 1928, and are nearly as old as Sarah Lawrence itself.

We hope you enjoy this new addition to Sadie Lou, and that you’ll join us as we explore, and take part in, the institutional history of student work at the College.

This show might as well be starring Sarah Lawrence students:

Now where could we find an SLC alum who’d be willing to produce such a show?

Award-winning British studio Aardman Animations, responsible for the creation of films like Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit shorts, has now developed a new stop-motion ad campaign to raise awareness about people with disabilities.

Creature Discomforts examines the lives of the disabled through a non-controversial lens, tackling the realities of jobs, sexual relationships, and overcoming social prejudices and stereotypes. Originally launched last November, the campaign features TV and radio spots, as well as in-depth documentaries about the making of the project and the people behind the characters.

Discomforts, inspired by the successful Creature Comforts series, is a collaboration between Aardman and U.K.-based Leonard Cheshire Disability.

Wordle is the best thing to happen since sliced bread.

Okay, not really, but the web-based art tool is pretty fun. Below is a word cloud created out of text from Sadie Lou:

Language enthusiasts rejoice: in this week’s NY Times Magazine, Caroline Winter asks why English speakers capitalize the word ‘I’. In the informative but (unfortunately) brief piece, Winter also hypothesizes such an action’s outcome:

So what effect has capitalizing “I” but not “you” — or any other pronoun — had on English speakers? It’s impossible to know, but perhaps our individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focused on money and success if we each thought of ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot. There have, of course, been plenty of rich and dominant cultures throughout history that have gotten by just fine without capitalizing the first-person pronoun or ever writing it down at all. There have also been cultures that committed atrocities even while capitalizing “you.”