Blogs on Michail Rybakov

Photographic tools

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 14:07:46 +0000

I’ve started designing custom film cameras, and needed tools to understand what kind of tolerances and imperfections can I get away with when guessing focusing distances. And more importantly, what kind of image would a lens create, and how the field of view, depth of field, focal length and aperture would correspond across different film formats. I haven’t really found good tools online, so I created some myself. Hope they can help someone:

Circle of Confusion Calculator
This one shows what would be in focus and how front/back blur behaves across formats. It was really eye-opening for me to play with it and understand the relationships between the different factors and how they shape the image. The Circle of Confusion tells us what a point light source turns into after going through the lens. It is basically the brush with which you paint light. And at different film formats (at similar image viewing distances), similar sized CoC might appear to paint a sharp or a blurry picture. Play with the tool to find out more!

Background Blur Accumulation Calculator
This one shows background blur accumulation at different format and apertures, to see what lens you would need in e.g. 35mm to simulate a LF look. In this case specifically an abstract measure of “how much blur will there be for 2 meters behind the focus point”. It was created specifically for environmental portraits and uses vertical angle of view (instead of, as often used, the diagonal) to get a better feeling of background separation in portraits. It tries to help you with the questions of “Where should I place the person?” and What lens and what aperture should I use for better background separation?"

Helicoid Extension Calculator
This one shows your helicoid/focusing rail extension across focal lengths and focus distances.

Distance Scale Creator
This one is for creating a distance scale and printing it out at home.

All of them are interactive, so play around and see how it all relates. Let me know if somethings is not working as expected!

Pixel Piranhas

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 14:07:46 +0000

I really hate it when I’m exposed to some horrible news online, and feel powerless. There is nothing I can do, I am not responsible, and yet at the same time I have this feeling “this shouldn’t be happening”.

There is a temptation to immediately react – if it was printed, I would crumple up the paper and throw it away – yet, reading pixels on the screen I don’t have the right gesture to express my discontent.

So I made this little browser extension. Click on a button, and a horde of cursors, like hungry piranhas, will slowly rip the web page apart for you.

Sounds fun? Install on Firefox or Chrome.

The Petzval machine

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 14:07:46 +0000

This image is taken with a (60 year old) Bronica C medium format camera, with a (120 year old) Petzval-type lens.

This camera is not only beautiful in a vintage car sort of way, but is also uniquely suited for adapting old lenses on medium format. On a typical camera, the lens houses the helicoid, the mechanical corkscrew-like part that moves the optics closer and further away from the subject allowing you to focus properly. On the Bronica, the helicoid sits between the body and the lens, and so you can adapt all kinds of weird lenses onto it. This particular lens probably stems from the late 19th, early 20th century. It has no markings on the body, but as I disassebled it to clean the glass, I found the inscription “A. Laverne & Co. Paris” on the rim of a glass. There were quite a few small optics manufacturers in the 19th century - the startups of the era.

The Petzval lens type was the first portrait lens design, created in 1840. It has with two elements at front and two at the back, and has a strong sharpness drop towards the corners. No, wait, it’s more accurate to say that only what’s in the center can ever have a high enough resolution. (Unless of course, you move the lens off-center, like you can with a large format camera). But sometimes, this lack of sharpness and the disquiet character of the rendering is what we are after.

Shoutout to Chris and Lina who were so patient with me on this August afternoon!

Sofa consensus

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 14:07:46 +0000

Abwesenheit

Mon, 29 May 2023 14:07:46 +0000

Sometimes I get tired of the usual composition, of the trained way of seeing. Lately I tried to make photographs that not only depict nothing in particular, but also guide the attention of the viewer around, showing nothing.

The colors guide you in one direction, the focus in another one, and the composition a third. Its only value lies in the movement of the viewers eyes, in the choreography of the gaze.

A village for Paul Signac

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 12:07:46 +0000

Henri Matisse's home

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 12:07:46 +0000

Marc Chagall's home

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 12:07:46 +0000

Octopus hugging a tree

Sun, 29 May 2022 14:07:46 +0000

These things became annoyingly good at generating visually rich images. They are still bad at guiding attention, but perhaps that’s part of their beauty.

Places of belonging

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 14:07:46 +0000

Where do people go, when the whole world seems foreign? Where do they find places for themselves? A space to be and not just react.

I find it not easy to fotograph, since I’m aiming to create a portrait of the space, not of the person. More and more they begin to seem inseparable.

With big thanks to Laura and Vanny.

Seeing and smelling the Critical Zone

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 14:07:46 +0000

As part of the Critical Zones exhibition in ZKM Karlsruhe, Hanna Jurisch and I offered workshops to experience the Critical Zone in a more direct way. We called it “Kritische Zone riechen und sehen”, or, translated, “Seeing and smelling the Critical Zone”.

The Critical Zone is all about the processes of living, about living organisms and their entanglements. The difficult thing about dealing with the Critical Zone is that our usual mental models that describe the space we live in seem inadequate and insufficient: top-down maps may show geographical features but are frozen in time. Worse yet, they don’t show any chemical, biological, mechanical processes of living, or any living organisms at all for that matter. They capture a specific point of view, not a point of life (point de vue vs. point de vie as Bruno Latour would say). Sure, maps might sometimes show a single tree, but not the other things that make the tree alive – the water level, the rain, the chemical exchange between tree roots and bacterial colonies, the parasites and the birds that hunt them and so on. There is no future nor past in a map, there is no illness, no movement, no birth or death in a map.

It’s not a problem of scale, as it does not change even if we become very local, if we zoom in closely on one specific point. Here an example:

On the left you see the changes to Dubai over a time period of 1984-2016, taken by satellite, looking down on earth from the outside. This is as an extreme example of terraforming and land development, fueled by vanity and the political will to build funny looking shapes into the ocean. And even with this being the extreme example, the timeframe of thirty years is a large one. A casual observer drinking tea in the orbit and looking down on earth would not notice the change brought by our processes of life.

On the right, a flock of common wood pigeons landed in front of my house in Karlsruhe, February 2021. The polar vortex broke in February, covering large parts of US and Europe in ice and snow. The wood pigeons moved from the woods to cities to find a bit more warmth and food. They move as individuals, until they get spooked by an arriving bike driver, and fly away as a flock, as a superorganism.
This slice of life may be human scale, but it still shows just a point of view. The text description above is needed to turn it into a (very limited, admittedly) point of life.

So Hanna and I decided to cast aside the hyper-global medium of maps and hyper-local medium of video, and searched for a new way to get attuned to the processes of living, of all the tiny interwoven actions happening within the Critical Zone. We arrived at similar but distinct approaches.

Hanna talking about the similarities in shape and texture between human-made and non-human made found objects

Hanna would take the workshop participants for a walk and let them gather material, human-made and non-human-made alike. Gather everything that grew around the museum or was discarded by people. All the unseen, unintentional objects in the surroundings. Like a dog that sheds hair, processes of life shed bottle caps, pieces of glass, feathers, drinking straws, leaves, bark, empty vodka bottles, screws, scrunchies, moss and concrete.

All the gathered material would later be arranged into sculptures and new taxonomies by the participants.

Some of the sculptures and taxonomic reorderings that happened in the first workshop

My own approach was to try and capture the scent of the world around us.
I let participants gather fragrance materials from within their homes – basically everything that has a smell – and use these to create perfumes. Old coffee grounds, earth from a flower pot, fresh leaves, stale bread, or a mushroom found in the garden – all that was welcome, all that we would mix together into a perfume. A perfume of our own – very local – part of the Critical Zone.

I see these perfumes as true ‘scent maps’ of one specific point of life. Not only were the materials gathered by a person who (most of the time) somehow decided to have them in their lives, scents are also seemingly immaterial witnesses of material processes of life. Most smells that surround us are organic in origin, are witnesses of transformation of matter through living organisms, often unseen by us humans. Smell is a process.
One other thing I particularly like about smells is the sensory parallelism. Sure, some particularly smelly molecule might be overpowering others, but most of the times what we perceive as a scent is a combination of many different scents, many different organic molecules stemming from many different processes of life. And we perceive it all at once – something that is impossible to achieve by mapping the Critical Zone in the usual, top-down way.

Dima's mom

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 14:07:46 +0000

2007, St.Petersburg, Russia.

Being an octopus

Sat, 01 May 2021 14:07:46 +0000

Mio asked a few artists and designers to write exercises and interventions that they do when feeling lonely or lost.
She got some interesting results.

Below is my exercise – Being an octopus – that I enjoy doing when I feel stressed. I recorded it as an audio guide. The German language version is below the fold.

Being an Octopus

Imagine yourself as an octopus inhabiting the landscape of your body. Think about the place in your body where it feels comfortable, where it feels at home, this octopus. My octopus lives in the back of my head, warming my neck. Where could the nest of your octopus be?

Now imagine this octopus floating in the landscape of relationships. There are other octopuses, objects, or situations floating around it. Each of your eight arms is reaching out to different directions. Each one is holding something. Or touching another octopus. Holding a situation. Repelling something. Playing with something.

Think of the situations you are currently dealing with and let the octopus hold them. Picture the octopus arm as it holds, or tries to hold such a situation. Maybe there is nothing to hold? Maybe the grip is particularly tight? Who is holding the situation at the other end? Or is the octopus arm touching another octopus’s arm directly? Maybe the octopus is holding on to something? Or is being held? The octopus has eight arms with which it can grab hold of things. Go through each of them and imagine up to eight situations.

Now, let go of them one by one. Imagine the octopus letting go of a situation. Whatever the octopus lets go of doesn’t fall or disappear, it stays where it was. Let your octopus arm contract, curl up. Go through all the situations you imagined one by one. Release your grip on them, let them stay where they were, roll up your octopus arm and withdraw.

Now all the octopus arms are rolled up. The octopus is floating, unconnected, with its arms comfortably curled up under its body. Sense how that feels. Does it feel airy and bright? Warm and protected? Allow yourself to linger in this state for a while.

Now start to roll out one of your arms again. Touch whatever you like, not necessarily what you’ve held before. Explore it. Caress it. Hold on to it if it feels right. Or go on to find something else.

Repeat this procedure several times with the free arms, but make sure to let one or two arms remain unconnected. They are free to explore yourself and the world.

Feel yourself connected again. Listen to how that feels.

Sense how it feels to know that your octopus arms could let go or grab hold of something again at any time.

Research published

Sun, 04 Apr 2021 14:07:46 +0000

ZKM, the german media art museum, published my research on Strategies of Arrival, done under guidance of Bruno Latour.

It’s made up of three parts:

Inhabiting a map

How to enter a space

and

Instruments of reation

The first one is the most spectacular I guess, but make sure to check out the others too. And, once the museums reopen, check out my piece at the current ZKM exhibition Critical Zones.

На опушке

Sun, 08 Dec 2019 14:07:46 +0000

Momtaz

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 14:07:46 +0000

But also, [redacted], look at this guy. Look at this photo of a bangladeshi guy holding a small basket of starfruits. Fifty thousand people liked it when he posted it on [a social media website]. This guy, Momtaz his name, titled it “Dragon fruits on my rooftop garden”, and was giving respectful replies to all the comments that followed. Saying he doesn’t sell the starfruits but grows them to give to his friends and family. You know what’s remarkable about it? How normal it is. This whole situation just reeks of normality and authenticity. His whole posture, the way he is holding the basket, his face - damn even the title is incredibly basic. Dragon fruits on my rooftop garden. He doesn’t want to impress anyone. Does not want to achieve any special significance through his work, nor is he ashamed of it. He does not care for popularity or attention. He just grows starfruit on his rooftop garden, to give to his friends and family and is content with that. Can’t we all be a little bit more like Momtaz? Can’t we not detach the expectation of intellectual significance, artistic value or however else we derive our self-worth, from the things we do? If you are not a massage therapist, a cook or live life like the guy doing the primitive technologies youtube channel, then the concepts of work, value, self-expression and self-worth will be disconnected anyhow. Wouldn’t it make sense to follow the wisdom of this old psychodelic soviet animation : “Do a good deed and throw it in the water”. Meaning “do good and don’t expect anything in return”. Like Momtaz does.

AI deleting human bodies

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 14:07:46 +0000

I used neural networks to recognize and remove human bodies from videos, simultaneously trying to fill the void they left. Why? Well, as we are externalizing not just our bodily actions to tools, but our decision process to all-knowing, all-loving AIs, the traditional, perceivable image of what constitutes a human body has become obsolete. It seems oddly fitting in that case, for disembodied neural networks to remove our outdated bodily image.

Mira Hirtz performed for the camera. I then used Mask_RCNN to do body recognition and Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention to fill in the emptiness.

This was a test for Bruno Latour’s upcoming exhibition on the Critical Zone. Made in November 2018.

Wrapped in a blanket of brotherly love

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 14:07:46 +0000

Zuckerberg emojis

Sun, 15 Jul 2018 14:07:46 +0000

Squint your eyes!

You’d think an emoji would be a clear and precise representation of an emotion. However the difference in rendering on different devices provides a great potential for miscommunication.

But even on the same platform, the kind of emotional reaction you may express is curated through the choice and design of available emojis. Take Facebook for example. The five Facebook emojis give you broad expressive capabilities, yet their design is very specific - and close to the extreme ends of the emotional scale. When using emojis, we wear these slightly too big masks of these particular, predefined facial expressions. We are becoming them.

I decided to reverse the process, to add body to the digital expression. That body should be, of course, that of Mark Zuckerberg.

Here are the results, created through disembodied neural networks.

I think CNNMRF grew the eyes from the hair, from the imagined eyebrows it found.

How it’s done:

First CNNMRF populated the emoticons with features of Marks face. It especially likes eyes and hair. I then used Deep-Image-Analogy to add more features, contrast, structure and adjust histogram. Finally jcjohnsons neural-style was used to upscale the image while adding texture.

1.Original 2.CNNMRF result 3. Deep Image Analogy output 4.Upscaled with Neural-style

Stickers for Telegram now available: https://t.me/addstickers/cursedmark.

Got a question? Just ask me.

Neural nets see cancer zombies

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 14:07:46 +0000

Looking for ways to visualize machine learning processes. Neural nets are trained to recognized cancerous Ki-67 marked cells in biopsies. Instead of just counting the cells, a neural style process is run to produce infinite zombies in their place.

Visualizing complexity

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 14:07:46 +0000

I was doing some research for an upcoming exhibition and looked into the question of tone in scientific communication, specifically the stylistic influence of visual representations of knowledge. Obviously the style changed over time, became more abstract, less naturalistic, less.. certain. As if the scientists became troubled by the idea of adding some character to the visual language - which is futile anyway: no matter what you do you end up with something that has character, just maybe a lame one. One particularly popular type of illustration in geosciences is the block diagram. While visually appealing, it often lacks any kind of a sensible way to embed processes that happen outside of the cut out piece of earth - the circulation of water, the circulation of life forms, human influence, changes over time - all that has to be added in some stupid way, with arrows and explanations.

Instead, I looked for ways to bring some of the old, more subjective ways to scientific illustrations. Add a few too many details. Make it alive, permeable for living creatures.

I took some illustrations by the 19th century German zoologist, philosopher and illustrator Ernst Haeckel, and used them as style for a neural style transfer algorithm.

We are conditioned to look for meaning in scientific illustrations. While the meaning is lost through the process of neural style transfer, the illustration gains a lot of visual complexity. As viewers we may sense a deep cross-interlocking between the animal and its environment, but we do not get the chance to actually understand the specifics of their relationships.

Here are a few more:

Because of the non-deterministic nature of neural style transfer, the results differ a little bit every time you run the script. Combining a dozen outputs creates an interesting effect. It’s not breathing nor movement but some kind of uncertainty that normally only comes when you freeze living matter in time. Like a collection of portrait photographs, neither of which is truly you.

How to do it yourself

Exposition

Fri, 18 May 2018 10:07:46 +0000

Exposition is the process of arriving in a movie, arriving at the characters’ vantage point, arriving in their space.

I shot this short film with Mira and Matina in August 2015, and I really like it for its exposition through insignificance.

The film starts with unimportant movements, movements that carry no meaning, and since there’s no significance to be ‘understood’, the viewers search for meaning continues. It plays with the relationship of the protagonists without explaining, and in the end, when we arrived, when we are ready, when we are invested in the characters, it just ends.

Open tabs are cognitive spaces

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 14:07:46 +0000

Nobody actually wants to use a web browser. It becomes evident the second you open your browser and notice that you don’t have internet connection. What we like about browsers is what they offer on the other side. What they connect us to. In that sense, browsers are transitory spaces - similar to airports, planes and train stations. Most of us have lost our childish curiosity towards these spaces - we go there because we want to arrive somewhere else.

Arriving somewhere else with early browsers was quite one-dimensional - you clicked your way from one website to the next, in the same window. You surfed. You bookmarked the pages that you wanted to return to.

Later, as the web became richer, you sometimes had more than one browser window open. I vividly remember having seven Internet Explorer windows open, thinking to myself “this is way too much to keep track of!”.

Right now, my Firefox has 477 tabs open.

How could this happen?

Tabs are externalized cognition

Cartographic spasms

Sun, 18 Feb 2018 10:07:46 +0000

The concept of a global village stems from an idealistic view of a shrinking world, connected through electronic media. What is far, comes closer, nothing is out of reach anymore.

Maps shape our undestanding of the physical world, so I decided to invert it. To shape the maps according to the understanding of the world - in this case according to the concept of a global village. I shrank the world little by little by removing empty, unused spaces. If they were valuable, they wouldn’t be unused, right?

Maps seem true and immutable, even though every projection of the spherical planet onto a two dimensional space produces faulty results. Either the northern and southern parts appear much larger than they really are (Greenland is actually 60% the size of India, not the other way around), or the shapes are all wrong, or both. But we trust maps, we trust that what they represent is the truth.

So it’s a special delight to play with this notion of cartographic immutability. This one is a breathing map of New York.

What could be in this text but isn’t:

How maps shape political understanding and decisions
How South America is much farther east than people commonly think. It’s really far east.
The whole discourse on failed globalization, nation states and Gaia
How the mental map combines positional cues with vector based cues (how humans actually navigate the world)

And here’s the code:

Movement Notation

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 14:07:46 +0000

There is a long history of movement notations. Before ubiquitous video capture you had to preserve the developed choreography somehow. Now they are more of a historical curiosity, even though they do look amazing as graphical systems.

Of course, you could also provide simple illustrations of positions, as was done in a book by Golena Voyachkova “Movement - the root of woman’s health and beauty” that came out in the Soviet Union in 1965. It tried to illustrate movement by showing the correct (on the left) and the wrong (on the right) way of doing things.

The last image is titled “The exemplary start of the negro”. This book is a good indication how movements were perceived as gender and race specific fifty years ago.

Then again you could describe movement through text:

Broken shapes and hidden bodies

Sun, 07 Jan 2018 10:07:46 +0000

at Bless Home Berlin.

Smoking in fashion as a promise of bodily experience

Sun, 24 Dec 2017 14:07:46 +0000

Diseases have always been fashionable. Tuberculosis brought us the fad of looking pale and skinny. Syphilis and it’s symptomatic light sensitivity and rotten noses brought us sunglasses and fake noses that were worn even by those not afflicted by the illness.
I won’t go into detail as to why disease becomes fashionable - first, I don’t really know, and then there’s a whole conference on it.

One point of interest for me is how a fashionable disease is a promise of a physical experience. Similar to a certain subset of internet memes I wrote about before, where a human or a non-human stand-in reminds the viewer of a bodily experience from everyday life.
Smoking in film and fashion can be interpreted in the same way - as a powerful, addictive, self-inflicted bodily experience, as a promise of being highly attentive to the body, the fingers, the mouth and the inside of the lungs.

As smoking becomes much less acceptable socially - and to advertisers - the fashion photography looks for new ways to make the signifier more abstract - the models shown here are not-smoking emptied non-cigarettes.

It would be interesting to test which other bodily experiences could be promised by fashion - besides the obvious promises of eternal youth, sex and drugs. How about being uncomfortable? Being fat using a fabulous fat-suit? Freezing in the winter while wearing a down jacket with huge holes? Not being able to pee, as the process of unwrapping the clothes takes hours? Never being thirsty with a 12-liter water pack hidden in the garment? Feeling unprotected with sleeves that don’t allow your hands to touch your body, combined with an exposed belly?

Include some promise of bodily experience within your work. It changes things.

What is not in this text but could be: - golden teeth and broken nose as a criminal status symbol - movement restricting feathers in male peacocks as a sign of fitness - jewellery made of wearer’s hair for cancer patients - fidget jewellery for autists as described in a previous text

Afrocubism

Thu, 07 Dec 2017 14:07:46 +0000

In the winter of 2013 I went to Guinea with a few friends. Guinea is one of my favourite destinations, since Silvia, the mother of my friend Christoph, is working there at a medical laboratory. And having nice people on the ground makes travelling to a foreign country much more enjoyable.

Guinea is an interesting country to visit. It is rich in natural resources, which leads to wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few powerful families. It also means that tourism is non-existent and the only white people present are professionals working at mining companies and NGOs. You can be the only white person in a densely populated area, and you get eyed on the streets - it feels like everything you do would be talked about later, so you end up being not only a guest but also an ambassador for your culture.

The Empire of Oil

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 14:07:46 +0000

Costa Compagnie was preparing the Empire of Oil 360° movie to show at Ballhaus Ost in Berlin.

Two days before the premiere:

The Vertical Human Decimeter

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 14:07:46 +0000

Mira Hirtz has a good write-up on how abstractions and representations of things become the things they meant to represent.

With regards to representations, one phenomenon that I particularly like is what I call interference. It happens when something, through its idiosyncratic existence, leaves traces in the outside world. Traces that show some of the object’s properties in a concise way.

Just look at these photographs:

Taken in Karlsruhe.
And the next one in the Alps, but that doesn’t matter that much:

The top one I call Rabbits, while the lower one is called Cows.

This kind of cow and rabbit representation contains no information about their fur or their big faithful eyes - or any of the stuff that would be discernible from an animal drawing. Instead, it offers a one-dimensional but precise documentation that the animals are present, they are hungry, they eat tree leaves and are just around this tall.

Mira also made a point that illustration of female sexual organs shape the idea of what [female] pleasure should be like.
I guess, the most suitable metaphor for the general understanding of female genitals I ever encountered is the Vertical Earth Kilometer in Kassel. It is an artwork by Walter De Maria - a two-inch thick solid brass rod that extend one kilometer down into the earth.

On any arbitrary point on this planet a Vertical Earth Kilometer exists, though it is not perceived as such. Only through its measurement, through a penetration of earth by a thick rod, is it getting a representation that can be communicated easily. Furthermore, the existence of the rod is purely speculative at this point in time. Sure, there must be eye witnesses that observed the rod being driven into the earth over 29 days, or, to put it differently, over a full moon cycle. But the visitors have no means to verify it: the rod is hidden from view. Yet even the theoretical existence of the rod is enough for a Vertical Earth Kilometer to exist.

Comparing this situation to the general understanding of male and female genitalia is left as an excercise to the reader.

What can not be represented, does not exist conceptually. Luckily, with new imaging techniques, female sexual organs are starting to be represented not as absence of a rod but as complex three-dimensional organs they are.

Results for ‘clitoris 3d’ on google image search.

Der Herbst kommt

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 14:07:46 +0000

The boundaries of Data Visualization

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 14:07:46 +0000

It is always great fun to try and find patterns in vast amounts of data. Sometimes you find causation, other times just spurious correlation, but it’s a great excercise and the insight you get can be surprising.

For a while, I have been wearing a light sensor that measures the surrounding light. The light that is around us, everywhere we go. It’s intensity and color. These graphs below are just two data points from January and April. Each horizontal pixel represents one minute, with data ranging from 6 am to 8 pm. You can see how the light changes from winter to spring, but as I know my daily routines, looking at these data reminds me of the course of events on the represented days.

Changes over time can be shown well in a time lapse animation.

Power point play

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 14:07:46 +0000

My nephew’s laptop is so old, he can’t play fifa. Instead, he animates soccer games in Powerpoint.

Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) for everyone

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 14:07:46 +0000

I had a simple dream. A dream of embedding videos in a web page without using third party services such as youtube or vimeo. For a while it seemed that I found the solution: using ffmpeg to convert the source videos to highly optimized h264 mp4 files. I wrote about my process before. The drawback is, that you only get one quality setting. Use a high bitrate and the video will load slowly or stutter on slow connections. Use a low bitrate and it will load smoothly but never looked quite as beautiful as it should. You can never win.

Luckily, there is a solution: Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH). The concept is quite simple: you generate a few versions of your video with different bitrates, a manifest file that links to those versions, and let the browser decide - according to the current bandwidth - which version to load.

But see for yourself:
A single page with three autoplaying videos, using the standard html5 video.
And the same page, but with MPEG DASH.

Every modern browser supports MPEG-DASH through the use of media source extensions. Well, except iOS Safari and Opera Mini. For those, an additional HLS stream - or a fallback to a normal mp4 file - can be used. Media source extension support in the browsers means that you still have to use an additional js player such as dash.js or shaka player to play your MPEG DASH streams.

So, lets convert our videos with some command line magic. You will need ffmpeg for the conversion and MP4box(part of gpac) to create the manifest file. On a mac, the easiest way to get those is through Homebrew.

brew install ffmpeg gpac

Convert the source file called input.mov into an audio file and two video files:

    ffmpeg -y -i "input.mov" -c:a aac -b:a 192k -vn "output_audio.m4a"

    ffmpeg -y -i "input.mov" -preset slow -tune film -vsync passthrough -an -c:v libx264 -x264opts 'keyint=25:min-keyint=25:no-scenecut' -crf 22  -maxrate 5000k -bufsize 10000k -pix_fmt yuv420p -f mp4 "output_5000.mp4"

    ffmpeg -y -i "input.mov" -preset slow -tune film -vsync passthrough -an -c:v libx264 -x264opts 'keyint=25:min-keyint=25:no-scenecut' -crf 23  -maxrate 2000k -bufsize 4000k -pix_fmt yuv420p -f mp4 "output_2000.mp4"

What do all those options mean?

The digital precision

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 20:07:46 +0000

V.I Lenin died and left the stumps behind

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 20:07:46 +0000

What do we see here? On the left is a papier-mâché box, with a Palekh style miniature on it. It is dated 1961. The style developed after icon painters from the city of Palekh had to find new jobs following the revolution of 1917. The painting on the box depicts the tree stumps on which Vladimir Ilich Lenin used to rest and work. In the distance a foreign delegation looks on.

On the right, Fidel Castro is laying flowers to the tree stumps, on which Lenin used to sit and work. I repeat, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is laying dying flowers to the dead tree stumps on which the deceased Vladimir Ilich Lenin used to rest and work.

The thing with the stumps is quite amazing in itself. How else could you stage the absence of a person if not by the stumps that signify the absence of trees that stood there once, tall and proud. The person is long gone and only the absence of the trees is left.

Sandwich

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 14:07:46 +0000

Christoph, teaching guinean kids the pronounciation of shandwish.

Sun, 11 Jun 2017 20:07:46 +0000

{Spam|Shadow marketing} is {amazing|great}!

Fri, 26 May 2017 14:07:46 +0000

Spam emails try to get through filters by having slightly different content, such as writing “incredible” and “fantastic” interchangeably.
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My name is Cow

Sat, 20 May 2017 14:07:46 +0000

In a reddit thread on health inspection violations someone offered a story about a run away cow licking bread in a recreation of a 18th century french bakery.
A commenter wrote a poem about the incident:

my name is Cow,
and wen its nite,
or wen the moon
is shiyning brite,
and all the men
haf gon to bed -
i stay up late.

i lik the bred.

It is unclear why it caught on so quickly, but the poem inspired countless imitations, telling more stories from the perspective of Cat, Cow or even Dog.
I would guess it is the plain form and the formidable self-confidence of Cow that makes this poem an essential response to our troubled times. Cow does not ponder on its identity or its actions. Cow knows what it is and what it does. Naturally. It liks the bred.

I wish for all my friends to be more like Cow. Believe in what you do. Do it. And find something to lik.

Ivana reading

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 14:07:46 +0000

The Balloon

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 14:07:46 +0000

There is something magical in such videos - since you are basically making something from nothing. The technique is borrowed from impro theater: you write the screenplay together as a group, with every participant saying one simple sentence on his or her turn. One by one a story is built. Then just film it using the simplest means, and you have a non-trivial movie in a day.

I used this technique in workshops with USANII-Lab in Nairobi, resulting in two short films in two days, the beautifully absurd My ambition for survival is the only way to eat my food and the more polished To painfully swallow the pain of being unnoticed.
As for the video above, that was just reviving this excercise for Ivana and me.

Кижи

Sat, 24 Dec 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Зенит - чемпион

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Irgendwo haben sie 100 Zenit-Bälle gefunden.

Chicken bicicleta

Sat, 29 Oct 2016 14:07:46 +0000

In Guinea laufen Hühner überall rum, sie sind schmal und schmächtig, leicht und knochig wie Rennradfahrer.

Питерские дворики

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Ходил я по дворам; дворы дрожали.

Mit FFMPEG Videos für Web optimal speichern, nur heute, nur jetzt

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Wer Videos über Vimeo oder youtube publiziert, muss sich mit solchen Fragen nicht beschäftigen. Für die zwei Leute, die selber noch Videos in mp4 konvertieren um sie dann in ihre Webseiten einbinden ist es vieleicht interessant.

Also vielleicht interessant zu erfahren, dass ich lange Zeit es falsch gemacht habe mit direkten Exporten aus FinalCut oder MPEGStreamclip. Es geht besser mit ffmpeg.

FFMPEG kann man recht leicht mit Homebrew installieren, wie man alles so leicht mit homebrew installieren kann.

Und dann im Terminal zum gewünschten Ordner navigieren und FFMPEG ausführen mit den Zauberoptionen:

ffmpeg -vcodec libx264 -vf "format=yuv420p" -preset slow -tune film -crf 25 -maxrate 4000k -bufsize 1000k -movflags +faststart -y videooutput.mp4 -i video.mov

Dies konvertiert video.mov in h264 mit guter Qualität und einer variablen Bitrate die nach oben hin auf 4Mbit begrenzt ist.

Im Einzelnen bedeutet es:

The main points of the second presidential debate

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at the second debate.
I don’t think they like each other too much.

Russia is..

Sun, 02 Oct 2016 14:07:46 +0000

..growing chicken under a high voltage transformer station.

Фермерские хозяйства, деревни и села расцветают, если включить попсу девяностых.

Glossolalia

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 14:07:46 +0000

My nephew Timofey has some trouble accepting the arbitrary authority of adults. In this case, while the mother was away, an older man said something to him in an authoritative voice. Timofey’s reaction was to try and search for his mother, and - after that proved ineffective - to discharge his emotions in a loud, angry but non-confrontational way. He just screamed some meaningless speech-like sounds into the air.

Glossolalia - speaking in tongues - is practiced in some religious communities that consider it to be a divine language.
The people of Deepmind trained it’s neural networks to find a better model of speech generation. And now, without an input it speaks in tonges (scroll down to “Knowing What to Say”).

Perhaps it is a good way for a computer to get emotional. In case an older man blindly assumes authority over it.

Primitive

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Primitive is a command line tool to turn pictures into abstract images.

I played around with it using the frames of this video of a dog in the russian forest:

Primitive time!

How do we get here?

Russia is

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 14:07:46 +0000

..a childhood spent playing in ruins.

Сказка сказок

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 14:07:46 +0000

В “Сказке сказок” есть сцены, утопающие в желтом свете, там всё хорошо и спокойно и все дома и что-то потихоньку делают.
Воспоминания о детстве, наверное.

Нашел эту фотографию августа 2015 и вспомнил. Папа построил веранду, и теперь там солнечно, и можно сидеть и есть персики в свете сказки сказок. Арс с папой и едят.

Neubauten

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Когда мне еще не было и двадцати, я постоянно искал музыку, новую, незнакомую музыку - не существующую в реальном мире. Друзья мои ходили на концерты и ездили на фестивали, а мне это было не интересно, слишком приземленно и обыденно. Я сидел в интернете на audioscrobbler.com, и слушал Coil, Amon Tobin, какого-то чувака с брагофоном, Karlheinz нашевсё Stockhausen, Venetian Snares и конечно Einstürzende Neubauten.

А тут, на окончание семестра, эти самые падующие новостройки сыграли в универе. Новый ректор пригласил по старой дружбе.

Вот этот парень с большим носом, весело лупящий топориком по кирпичам - FM Einheit. Ему пятьдесят семь.

B27 / Berlin 2013

Fri, 11 Mar 2016 14:07:46 +0000

It was summer 2013, and Christoph asked me to film a documentary for B27, a choreography for finding home. Well, it is now that I understand that it was a choreography about finding home - at that point it was just a ragtag team of misfits: dancers, actors and a screenwriter, put in a room in Berlin, with three weeks time to find a piece to perform. And Franz Rogowski, who was trying to direct us.

Naturally, we started out by making a photoshoot for a poster for the non-existing play:

The play itself was to be discovered through experimentation, finding pieces that may work and combining them.
One of the things that were found was.. voluntary convulsions.

My guess is that you can not find home - any home - without being at home in your own body. A body is defined by it’s borders, by it’s freedom of movement.
And the ultimate self-movements of the body are exactly that - convulsions. Convulsions let you reevaluate your bodily borders and limits of control.

But see for yourself:

Die Magisterprüfung

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Aus der Magisterprüfung der Julia Emmler.
Jetzt neu - man kann die Videos mit Sound anschauen. Es lohnt sich!

Vor einem Jahr auf Rügen

Sun, 06 Mar 2016 20:07:46 +0000

Vor einem Jahr auf Rügen war es so kalt,
vor einem Jahr auf Rügen war es so kalt, dass der Sanddornsaft einfror in der Verpackung, wenn man ihn draußen gelassen hat.
Es war so kalt, dass der Laub bei jedem Schritt in Staub zerfiel, den ganzen Wald erschütternd.
So kalt, dass die Dunkelheit sich nicht traute zu kommen, wartete nebenan den ganzen Tag lang, und wenn sie dann endlich kam, fiel sie in Flocken vom Himmel.
Es war so kalt, dass man beim Gehen nur die Mitte des Körpers verwenden konnte; die Periphärie war vor Kälte erstarrt.

Vor einem Jahr auf Rügen war es so kalt, dass ich mich nicht traute, deine Hand zu nehmen, und so bist du mir vorweg gegangen, samt Hand.

Manchmal war es aber auch recht warm.

On shades

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 20:07:46 +0000

Der Anblick von Guinäer in Militäruniformen oder mit Sonnenbrillen erzeugt bei mir ein ungutes Gefühl in der Magengegend. Zum Teil durch die Bilder der Berichterstattung aus Afrika verursacht, zum Teil aus der Erinnerung an meine erste Reise. Da wollte ich mal ein Bild von der Straße machen, und ein paar entlang spazierende Militärs haben es gesehen. Natürlich wollten sie die Kamera konfiszieren, weil es ja illegal ist, Militäreinrichtungen und Soldaten abzulichten. Ich hab mich in der NGO verschanzt und ließ die eloquenten Wächter die Lage klären.

Da, da sehen sie mich!

Mbo

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Alassan (links) und Alcin. Auch Mbo genannt, weil niemand sie auseinander halten kann. Sehr ernste Leute.
Am dritten Tag kam Alassan nicht zu den Übungen, da er mit 40° Fieber im Bett lag. Im Krankenhaus steckten benutzte Nadeln aus dem Bett, und so hat Christoph ihn einfach mit Antibiotika gefüttert, und mit Käsebrot, und dann ging es schon.
Den Alcin musste ich beim feierlichen Drehabschluss aus dem Pool ziehen, als er in der Mitte von dem Pool nicht von der Stelle kam, und auch den Boden nicht erreichte.
Seitdem kümmerte er sich um mich, wie um einen kleinen, etwas dümmlichen Bruder - schnürte mir die Schuhe richtig zu beim Fußballspielen, wischte mir den Dreck aus dem Gesicht nach einem misslungenem Kopfballversuch und erklärte geduldig die Lage, wenn ich mal mit meinem Französisch nicht vorankam.

Also, ich glaube, das war Alcin. Mbo eben.

LGA

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 20:07:46 +0000

Laboratoire Médical Guinéo-Allemand. Der weißeste Ort in Conakry.

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 23:07:46 +0000

// Husten? We have a problem. //

sometimes

Fri, 19 Feb 2016 20:07:46 +0000

sometimes I feel //
like a motherless child //

Gait

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Wenn man nach langem Flug noch auf den verspäteten Zug warten muss, kann man den Gang der Menschen beobachten.
Wie sie das Knie voranschleudern, und der Unterschenkel schwingt mit und die Ferse trifft gewaltsam auf den Boden.
Oder da läuft jemand sehr kontrolliert, schwunglos, und stellt sein Fuß vorsichtig ab.
Und wie die Zwischenschicht zwischen Mensch und Boden die Raumposition und Bewegungsablauf beeinflußt! Ein Wunder, dass sie nicht alle ausrutschen!

Ich saß da, ließ die Peking-Ente kalt werden und versank völlig in menschlichen Füßen, bis mein Zug kam.

What is Deutschland?

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

How does it feel, to return to Germany after a few weeks in Africa?
There are no people on the streets.
There are no loud sounds.
It smells of nothing.

It is supposed to be a rich country but is defined by absence.

Le Grand Marche

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Grand Marché Madina, shortly before closing time on a friday.
Listen with headphones.

Долгая дорога домой

Sat, 13 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Там, за стеною, океан.

Иногда лучше молчать и слушать

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 20:07:46 +0000

Иногда лучше молчать и слушать океан.

А был бы прилив, ноги Кристофа были бы в воде.

The movement of lizard's tail on the wall of the pool

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 19:07:46 +0000

Es saß auf der Poolwand eine Eidechse, die hatte ihren Schwanz unter Wasser. Sie bewegte sich nicht, nur das Wasser schwappte auf und ab und es schien, als würde sie mit dem Schwanz wedeln.
Ich habe das gefilmt, zwanzig Minuten lang, wie die Eidechse ihren Schwanz bewegt, also nicht die Eidechse und nicht den Schwanz, aber es sah ja so aus. Ich habe das gefilmt, und die Speicherkarte in die Hosentasche getan, weil sie voll war, die Speicherkarte. Die Speicherkarte zerbrach beim Fußballspiel mit Zehnjährigen, aber dafür haben wir ja diese Geschichte.

Die Eidechse ist nicht mehr da, ich hab nachgeschaut.

Bolzplatz

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 19:07:46 +0000

Die Flut kommt und bringt Sachen mit. Die Ebbe kommt, und zeigt sie.

Manchmal kommen ältere Spieler und tragen den Müll zur Seite. Danach kommt wieder die Flut. Das ist der Lauf der Dinge.

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Bats were flying.

Disappointment

Tue, 09 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Ребенок ищет сиську, а её уж нет.
Как мы сегодня, пришли, поснимали кино, пообещали на следущий день фотографии принести, а дома оказалось, что у мелкого фотопринтера, который специально с собой взяли нет чернил и бумаги.
Рррржжжррррррррр…

Безвременье

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Сегодня весь день провалялись дома. Я залечивал обгоревшую спину и ноги, а Кристоф отсыпался - он всю ночь смотрел Супербоул на телефоне. Да и просто после недели постоянной подготовки и работы, приятно ничего не делать.

Как в детстве бывали такие летние дни - да что там - всё лето бывало, в безвременье. Встал, поел, что-то почитал, что-то написал, искупался в бассейне..
И вроде всё есть, но нет той обязательности, необходимости оптимизации и планирования. А есть просто долгие, медленные, солнечные дни.

Der Ozean

Sun, 07 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Der Ozean ist sanft und verzeiht niemandem.
Der Ozean ist sanft und gibt den Rhythmus vor.
Gibt den Rhythmus vor mit Ebbe und Flut.
Gibt den Rhythmus vor mit jeder Welle, die ankommt und bricht.
Der Ozean atmet, und die Menschen passen sich dem Atem an, wie zwei Verliebte die einander umarmen.
Der Ozean ist laut: zuerst ist die Flut laut, dann die Welle, dann der Teil der Welle, der gerade aufbricht, dann das Tröpfchen, dann der Schaum. Sie sind laut, jeder für sich, jeder zu seiner Zeit und deswegen gar nicht so laut.

Der Ozean ist ein atmendes Fraktal, und wenn Ikea Ozean verkaufen würde, für Zuhause, würde ich mir zwei holen.

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Ich weiß immer noch nicht, ob Christoph wirklich telefoniert hat oder nur so getan hat.

//update: er hat nur so getan.

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

I stopped watching videos on youtube or facebook, as they became too pushy. They always seem to want to change my world view and want to grab and yank my attention. How disrespectful.
Just calm down a bit. Don’t assume ownership over my attention. If I like what’s happening, I’ll stay.

Thu, 04 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Hooded vultures are mating for life

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

The couple was eating garbage on the shore when a stray dog came by and pulled some long and pinkish white thing out of the ocean. The vultures joined in; it was a feast.

Vor der Wand

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Hinter der Wand

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 14:07:46 +0000

repaying idea debt

Tue, 05 Jan 2016 14:07:46 +0000

Heute erst hab ich ein Artikel über idea debt gelesen - die große Anzahl an aufgeschriebenen Ideen kann eher hinderlich sein, und wie eine todo-Liste wirken, die man abarbeiten muss. Wer will denn sowas?

Aber wohin mit den Ideen, mit den halb ausgesprochenen, halb im Mund hängenden Gedanken? Womit mit halb guten Fotos und unpassenden Anfängen?

Vielleicht an diesen Ort? Vielleicht gefällt es ihnen in diesem ruhigen Teich.