A short documentary on Theo Jansen and his animal creations

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Dutch artist and engineer Theo Jansen introduced us to a new form of life at TED2007—nimble kinetic sculptures that he crafts out of electric tubes and fans which gather wind energy. Jansen shared his idea: that his sculptures that could live as a herd on the beach and survive on their own.

Salazar, a director’s collective in Vancouver, Canada, stumbled upon Jansen’s talk and approached the artist about making a 7-minute documentary about his work and philosophy. Their short film, produced for Red Bull Media House, is now a staff pick on Vimeo. Watch above to see stunning imagery of Jansen’s creatures splashing in the ocean, and to see Jansen in his studio, creating these animals.

Nathan Drillot writes, “We originally found [Jansen’s] work because of the TED talk that he did. We wanted to say thank you and to hopefully return the favour by sharing the project we created with him.”

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Year two documentary on the Blue Brain project

The year two film of director Noah Hutton’s 10-year documentary-in-the-making on the progress of the ambitious Blue Brain Project is now online and well-worth watching.

The Blue Brain Project is often touted as aiming to ‘simulate the human brain’ but a more accurate description would probably be that it aims to create a simulation of cortical column circuits from the neuromolecular level up to the point where it’s as equally as complex as the human brain.

If the distinction isn’t clear imagine that you’re interested in how London works, so you decide to build a detailed computer simulation of suburban streets, but instead of aiming to replicate the geography of the genuine British city, you just make sure that it has as many roads as the capital itself.

Clearly, this is not an exact simulation of London, not least because the city is more than just suburban streets, but the complexity of the model would be incredibly useful in understanding the interaction between street level and city level activity at massive levels of complexity.

The same goes for neural simulation and the link between micro and macro levels of complexity is a major challenge for neuroscience. This is exactly what the Blue Brain Project aims to tackle.

However, as you can see in the film, project leader Henry Markham has the tendency to say that the project is about ‘understanding the brain’, which makes for good headlines, and takes nothing away from the impressiveness of the project, but is so broad that it doesn’t reflect the somewhat more neurobiological focus.

The project is, nonetheless, wonderful neuroscience and Noah Hutton’s film captures its progress during its second year.

Link to Noah Hutton’s ‘Blue Brain, Year Two’ film.

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