Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.
This week's Talk of the Town section of the New Yorker had an amazing piece about a series of mysterious youtube videos of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Vaslav Nijinsky is known as the best male dancer of the twentieth century. Unfortunately Nijinsky died retired at 29, and left behind no known footage of his dancing. Yet about a year ago videos of Nijinsky dancing began appearing on youtube, such as a clip from "Afternoon of a faun" seen below.
If there is no known footage of him, where was this archival footage coming from? From the New Yorker article:
"Because it turns out, these aren't films. They are computer-generated artifacts, made by Christian Comte, a French artist who has a studio in Cannes. Reached the other day, Comte acknowledged his authorship. "These films are animations of photographs, achieved thanks to a process that I invented," he said. "I work as an alchemist in animated cinema." He uses still photographs and, by employing a computer to alter them–tilt a head, move an arm–fills in the gaps between successive shots."
Link to the New Yorker Article, Comte's youtube account of the strangely mesmerizing videos.
