It's New Year's Eve! Let's Party!

More from Funki Porcini: The Devil Drives; visuals from "Simon of the Desert"  by Buñuel.
Here is Funki Porcini's bio at Pandora.

Aningaaq, a short film by Jonas Cuaron

 From The Hollywood Reporter:
During a pivotal scene in Gravity, Sandra Bullock's character Ryan Stone, trapped inside a Russian space capsule with little hope of survival, makes contact with a male voice speaking via radio in a foreign language. What unfolds on the other end of that fractured conversation, complete with a barking dog and a crying baby, is the subject of a short film by Jonas Cuaron, son of director Alfonso Cuaron... the seven-minute companion piece, titled Aningaaq, was financed by Warner Home Video, which initially envisioned it as a unique extra feature for Gravity's Blu-ray edition. But the stark, contemplative Aningaaq has developed a life of its own via festival screenings at Venice and Telluride.   (story)
Full-screen recommended!

SCRIPTURA VITAE

SCRIPTURA VITAE is a short-film based on the artwork of Aerosyn-Lex Mestrovic. Commissioned by the UK's Channel 4 and Protein London as part of the Random Acts arts platform Music by Diplo.
-Full-screen recommended!

Thunder, Perfect Mind

"For I am the first and the last. I am the wife and the virgin, I am the mother and daughter, I am senseless and I am wise... I am shame, and I am shameless... I am control, and I am uncontrollable. I am strength. I am fear. I am war and I am peace. I am substance, and the one who has no substance. I am compassion; I am cruel. Do not hate my obedience and do not love my self-control. I am the union, and the dissolution. I am she who exists in all fears, in strength, in trembling... I am the silence which is incomprehensible, an idea whose remembrance is frequent. I am the voice whose sound is manifold. and the word whose appearance is multiple. I am the utterance of my name..."

This is a film done for Prada, co-directed by Ridley Scott with his daughter, Jordan Scott. It stars the lovely Daria Werbowy, with music by John Altman.
The text is taken from a 2000 year-old Gnostic tractate titled "Thunder Perfect Mind" in which the voice is that of the Divine Sophia- the Goddess or Divine Feminine as it continued among the early Christian / Gnostic scriptural traditions, before they were banned and eliminated when the early Church of Rome imposed orthodoxy. The Egyptian community at Nag Hammadi buried their banned scriptures rather than see them destroyed, some 50 texts in 13 codices, and these were unearthed in 1945. Translations were completed in the 1970s. (ref)

Full screen recommended!

Civilization (Megaplex) - Marco Brambilla

Civilization (Megaplex), 2008, by Marco Brambilla. Watch in High-Def, full screen... Brambilla uses active video elements as textural and color areas around the central action. The music on this clip is 'Rites of Spring' by Igor Stravinski.

How Banking Works - Funki Porcini

How Banking Works, by Funki Porcini (Full-screen recommended)

Kino, by Light of Day, for Hugo Boss

Hugo Boss "Kino" from Light of Day. (Click the HD option for higher resolution playback- Full-screen recommended)

Wagner's 'Tristan and Isolde' meets Kafka at the Brandenburg Gate, with echoes of early Soviet graphics, and Gilliam's Brazil... An advertisement created by Light of Day for Hugo Boss. (An alternative version with a different soundtrack and a voice-over is on YouTube under the same title.) Here's an interview with Colin Stackpole, Creative Director at Light of Day.

Cosmo Sheldrake: Rich (Live at the sty)

        Cosmo Sheldrake performing "Rich" live at the Pig Sty.
        See more of Cosmo's work  at his website, CosmoSheldrake.com. (Full-screen recommended)

Projet Arches, by Jean-François Rauzier

Projet Arches, by Jean-François Rauzier. Full screen recommended!
Don't miss JF Rauzier's amazing Hyperphotos at his website.

Mashup: Statuesque Blessings

Mashup of Nina Paley's Metropolitan Museum statue sequence with Lulu Rouge, 'Bless You' excerpt. By the way, if you haven't yet seen the very talented Nina Paley's wonderful full length animation "Sita Sings The Blues" you can watch it in full here- highly recommended!

Change is In The Air

In The Air - Morgan Page, Sultan, Ned Shepard, BT,  featuring Angela McCluskey
"This was put together to celebrate the CHANGE in the air that is everywhere. Special thanks and respect to the dancers, shooters and performers. Conceived and chopped by JAB."

It's Summertime!

"In the Summertime" - Devendra Banhart et al, Golden Gate Park San Francisco, 2008.

What About Things Like Bullets? - Natalie Beridze

Natalie Beridze- "What About Things Like Bullets" taken from the album "Forgetfulness".

Director, Animator, Edit: Nika Machaidze

Camera: Sandro Darakhvelidze (Full-screen recommended)

Autumn De Forest

Autumn De Forest, 11. An amazing little girl, and an extraordinary painter!

5m80- Giraffe Pool Competition

Just for fun- A short film by Nicolas Deveaux. Produced by Cube Creative Productions & Orange. With the participation of Arte, the support of the City of Paris and the partnership of CNC.
(Full-screen recommended)

Miyoko Shida

 For once, I am at a loss for words- but perhaps here none are needed.
Miyoko Shida performs with Rigolo, Swiss Nouveau Cirque.

One More Must-See Space Station Video

Space Oddity, David Bowie 1969, comes home to roost in the Space Station, 2013. Astronaut Chris Hadfield is the soulful talent.

Departing Space Station Commander Sunita Williams Gives a Tour

In her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory and downlinked the video on Nov. 18, just hours before she, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency departed in their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft for a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan. The tour includes scenes of each of the station's modules and research facilities with a running narrative by Williams of the work that has taken place and which is ongoing aboard the orbital outpost.

Visualizing: The 2,299 Kepler Candidate Planets Around a Single Star

Animation by Alex Parker showing the 2299 high-quality (multiple transits), non-circumbinary transiting planet candidates found by NASA's Kepler mission so far. These candidates were detected around 1770 unique stars, but are animated in orbit around a single star. They are drawn to scale with accurate radii, orbital periods, and orbital distances. They range in size from 1/3 to 84 times the radius of Earth. Colors represent an estimate of equilibrium temperature, ranging from 4,586 C at the hottest to -110 C at the coldest - red indicates warmest, and blue/indigo indicates coldest candidates. Three white rings illustrate the average orbital distances of Mercury, Venus, and Earth on the same scale. (More to the story here)
The current list of planet candidates can be seen here.
Watching in full screen HD is recommended, so you can see even the smallest planets!
By Alex Parker - Postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Fossil-fuel Divestment Campaign

Bill McKibben and Christian Parenti discuss the Disinvestment Campaign and how best to confront the role of the fossil-fuel industry- what McKibben calls, "Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization."
And this: