creative process

A two-minute video of Ira Glass on the creative process, describing the gap between taste and skill when starting out and urging you to keep producing until your work matches your taste.

A three-minute clip of Steve Jobs arguing that great products come from people who care about content rather than process. He says process-focused people take over and cause decline, citing IBM as an example.

A three-minute rant by Harlan Ellison, excerpted from the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth, on why creative professionals should always be paid for their work rather than work for free or 'exposure'.

A short Conan segment in which George R. R. Martin explains that he writes his Game of Thrones books on WordStar 4.0 on a DOS machine.

A one-minute clip from the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons. Thomas More refuses to arrest the Devil, saying he would give even the Devil the benefit of law for his own safety's sake.

A two-minute animated minute meme by Nina Paley, photographed at the Metropolitan Museum, showing how all creative work builds on what came before. It is set to music from the Sita Sings the Blues soundtrack.

Jamie Oliver shows school kids how chicken nuggets are made by blending skin and mechanically reclaimed meat, as part of his school lunch campaign. The kids react with disgust.

A short scene from Silicon Valley season 1 episode 5 satirizing scrum and agile meetings. The characters mock how process rituals turn simple things into a job.

Elevated is a 4 kilobyte PC demo by RGBA and TBC from Breakpoint 2009. It fly-throughs a realistic procedurally generated landscape with synthesized music and post-processing, all from a tiny executable.

The Schoolhouse Rock! cartoon song 'I'm Just a Bill', in which a bill explains how it travels through Congress to become law.

A one-minute clip of Sir Thomas More's speech from 'A Man for All Seasons', defending giving even the devil the benefit of the law. The uploader ties it to debates about torture and extralegal action.

Elevated by Rgba and TBC, the winner of the 4k intro compo at Breakpoint 2009. It is a realtime procedurally generated 3D flythrough with music, all in a 4096-byte executable.

Tim Hutton's demonstration of SmoothLifeL, a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life using floating point values. It shows gliders traveling in any direction, rotating pairs, and elastic cord-like structures, with config details to run it yourself.

Intrinsic Gravity is a real-time demoscene production by Still, made with the Tooll tool for Under Construction 2014. It is a black-and-white op-art animation with a soundtrack by hoffman.

A 3-minute demo of a tiny IOCCC 2012 winning C program that simulates fluid dynamics in an 80x25 terminal, using any text (including its own source) as input. The video shows the simulation running to Handel's Water Music.

Jerobeam Fenderson shows how to draw a mushroom on an oscilloscope in XY mode using stereo audio, then animates it by modulating with a larger wave. Pd and Max4Live patches are provided.

Hartverdrahtet by Akronyme Analogiker, the winning PC 4k intro at Revision 2012. It is a realtime demo with music and fractal visuals in 4096 bytes.

A short demo of an open-source Krita plugin that uses Stable Diffusion to generate and edit images in place. It adds ControlNet scribble and line-art support. You select an area, push a button, and new matching content appears.

A demo of Marble Marcher, a game using a fractal physics engine and fully procedural ray-marched rendering. The player rolls a marble through shifting fractal levels.

A short ShaderToy piece by Martijn Steinrucken (The Art of Code) that renders rain on a windshield during a night drive, with blurred bokeh lights. It is set to music.

A one-minute visualization of a simulated ant colony in which ants follow pheromone trails, with the source code on GitHub. It shows emergent behavior arising from simple rules.

Planets is a track from the audiovisual album Oscilloscope Music, in which the audio signal drives an analog oscilloscope directly. The left channel sets horizontal deflection and the right sets vertical, so the sound draws vector graphics.

Paul Irish explains how pointerpointer.com works. It uses a hidden canvas of colored Voronoi regions to look up which photo matches the cursor position.

The official music video for Autechre's 'Gantz Graf', a dense, glitchy electronic track paired with abstract animated 3D visuals reportedly made by hand in 2002.

A short clip of Venetian Snares' track 'Look' from Songs About My Cats (2001), shown as a spectrogram. The audio encodes an image in its frequency content.

A short clip of a track from Emily Howell, a computer program by David Cope that composes classical-style music, performed by human players. It is a sample of algorithmic composition.

A condensed rendition of a project that re-uploaded one video to YouTube 1000 times, showing the accumulating compression artifacts. It pays homage to Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room.

An art project by Simon Weckert in which 99 smartphones pulled in a handcart create a fake traffic jam on Google Maps. A green street shows as red, which diverts cars to other routes.

Brandon Thomas demos Laser Pong, a game he built on a laser projector and projected onto buildings around Atlanta. It was a weekend project.

OK Go's music video for Needing/Getting, shot in the desert with a Chevy Sonic fitted with pneumatic arms that play over a thousand instruments across two miles.

A one-minute clip from a 2016 Toronto conference in which Geoff Hinton comments on deep learning and radiology. He suggests radiologists should stop being trained because machines would soon read scans better.

Apple's classic 'Think Different' commercial, a one-minute spot celebrating creative misfits and innovators. This upload is from 2006.

OK Go's music video for Upside Down & Inside Out, filmed during parabolic flights so the band and performers are weightless in the plane.

A 1996 clip of Steve Jobs saying that Microsoft lacks taste and is not a creative company.

A short satirical video, originally titled Broccoli Man, in which an engineer who only wants to serve 5 terabytes gets tangled in Google's internal resource and production processes. It is the source of the phrase about forgetting how to count that low.

A short demo of the Deep Visualization Toolbox, which shows the activations inside a convolutional neural network as it processes live camera input. Viewers see individual units responding to edges, faces and text.

Valve's short video on building the Steam Controller on a heavily automated assembly line, which the company designed itself. It shows the robotic manufacturing process and US final assembly.

A short clip from the 1980 British sitcom Yes Minister about why Britain is in the European Community, showing bureaucratic and diplomatic maneuvering.

A two-minute comedy sketch in which a foreigner speaking fluent Japanese is repeatedly not understood by Japanese people who refuse to process it.

A one-minute clip from the 1995 film Hackers in which characters trade technobabble about RISC architecture changing everything.