What would birds in flight look like if time was all smushed together?

August 19, 2016 1:26 PM

Ornitographies by Xavi Bou.

Side scrolling alas, though you can see basically the same picture in a vertical manner and with some commentary on io9.
Shades of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey.

posted by signal (29 comments total)

Look, up in the sky! It's a bad weave! It's a Tangela! It's Yog-Sothoth!
posted by prize bull octorok at 1:28 PM on August 19, 2016 [6 favorites]

...or we've discovered a giant species of rods.
posted by potch at 1:28 PM on August 19, 2016 [8 favorites]

this site is blocked by my work administrator because it is orn*ography
not even kidding :|

(This is not your fault, just something I felt needed to be shared.)
posted by phunniemee at 1:43 PM on August 19, 2016 [8 favorites]

Nice, potch! Rods/skyfish were the first thing I thought of too.
posted by edheil at 1:49 PM on August 19, 2016

That was beautiful. So nice after catching up on the Trump thread.
posted by bonobothegreat at 2:00 PM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

The straight-line paths tend to look so helical.
posted by jamjam at 2:12 PM on August 19, 2016

Reminds me of the skies of my childhood. Oh, how we laughed as the Great Twisting Rod devoured hecatombs of screaming sacrifices!

Happy days, happy days....
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:14 PM on August 19, 2016 [7 favorites]

vortex streets on bosoms of air
posted by hortense at 2:28 PM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

that reminds me, I haven't seen one damn Tangela in the last two weeks and they used to be all over.
posted by numaner at 2:37 PM on August 19, 2016

Wow, these are great, thanks for posting, signal!
posted by carter at 2:41 PM on August 19, 2016

That's a great video, hortense, but it went so much faster than I could follow!
posted by jamjam at 2:47 PM on August 19, 2016

I like the art but I don't like that the "about" part doesn't really explain any details about how they were made, other than "Ornitographies moves away from the scientific approach of chronophotography ". Does that just mean the artist takes a video and stitches together any bits he likes, but thinks about time while doing so?

Any ideas?
posted by SaltySalticid at 2:48 PM on August 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

You know why, when you see geese all flying together in a V formation that one arm of the V is longer than the other?

(rot13) Zber trrfr ba gung nez.
posted by roue at 2:56 PM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Sure go ahead and hide all those really cool photos behind a horizontal scrollbar.
posted by humboldt32 at 3:05 PM on August 19, 2016

Sure go ahead and hide all those really cool photos behind a horizontal scrollbar.

At least he didn't take them in Portrait Mode.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:08 PM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

You're not fooling me. Those are flying rods.
posted by Splunge at 3:48 PM on August 19, 2016

Wow.
posted by maryr at 3:57 PM on August 19, 2016

This is what birds look like in the 4th dimension.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:29 PM on August 19, 2016 [3 favorites]

Do you suppose we have a solid world because time is all smushed up? When we pull apart the threads it is like being the space between every emerging idea the universe has? Well, uh, excuse me just a fleeting moment of fractal possibilities invoked by the regularity of geese in flight.
posted by Oyéah at 5:43 PM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh, I was just riffing on some sci-fi story (Bradbury I think) that described 4D beings as looking like very long smushed chains of beings. But yeah, if we saw time as a dimension in the way we see space dimensions, I imagine the effect would be something like this. One can dream I guess.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 6:51 PM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Appropriately enough, they do look rather wibbly wobbly.
posted by rmxwl at 8:06 PM on August 19, 2016

These remind me of the inter-dimensional portals in the sky that draw Frank into Jim Woodring's universe.
posted by not_on_display at 11:16 PM on August 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

Does anybody have one for a flock (I am sure that is the wrong term) of 5000 starlings doing that group mind chaos thing? The most complicated dynamics might be beyond current data processing limits.

Murmuration apparently is the key search term.
posted by bukvich at 11:44 PM on August 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Starling murmuration youtube
posted by bukvich at 12:00 AM on August 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

Dunno why, but I immediately thought of The Echo Maker.
posted by ssmug at 4:58 AM on August 20, 2016

Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane, I think it's Vonnegut who wrote about long tapered 4d worms. I have always harbored the visualization of the universe being a tangled mess of tapered strings, big ones for planets which are woven into a long tangled tube of living organisms, etc. I remember being surprised when I read something along those lines years later... and I think it was in a Vonnegut novel but I'm not sure which one. On the other hand it might very well have been Bradbury.
posted by Wetterschneider at 7:45 AM on August 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

These are beautiful. Anyone know where I could buy prints?
posted by lydhre at 1:24 PM on August 20, 2016

I think it's Vonnegut who wrote about long tapered 4d worms.

This was driving me nuts all day, and in doing some digging, you're right: it was from Slaughterhouse Five. Although the Tralfamadores were not themselves long chains of beings, but rather saw everyone and everything else as being chains extending into the past and future.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:38 PM on August 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think a murmation is awesome to watch, but then they land and turn into a bunch if damn starlings.
posted by BlueHorse at 11:57 PM on August 21, 2016