The Johnny Cash Collaborative Video Project
Though the Johnny Cash Project has been a darling of technology and visual artist types since being launched in full on Sept. 30th, 2010, it seems to be virtually unknown within the music world. The best way to describe it is a collaborate art project with the goal of creating a living, breathing, evolving video for the great Johnny Cash that we can all contribute to.
By providing an interface for people to create original still frame art, and then fitting that art into a storyline and allowing people to rate the frames, a video for Cash’s song “Ain’t No Grave” has been created that can evolve and change over time. You can also customize the video with different frames to change the video to your liking: to a more abstract video, or a more realistic video for example. So far over 250,000 people from over 172 countries have contributed frames, and the project keeps on going.
“So it’s kind of this virtual resurrection and memorial” to Cash, artist Aaron Koblin told CNN. Cash sings, “When I hear that trumpet sound, I’m going to rise right out of the ground. Ain’t no grave can hold my body down,” and the video fulfills that notion, demonstrating that Cash’s art can’t be buried either.
This explains it better:
Here is the current project:
April 22, 2011 @ 1:50 pm
I caught on to this a few months back. Very fucking cool and a great tribute to the man in black.
April 22, 2011 @ 3:15 pm
I work in media and spend most of my week around graphic designers, television editors and the like. And I’ve never heard of this! I shall be passing this on as I’m sure many of them would love to contribute to this. Most people I know don’t like country music but everybody loves Johnny Cash! How extraordinary, what an inspiring project.
To give some perspective on how many different artworks are contained in this, there are 24 frames per second in a moving image. The video is approx 2 minutes 48 seconds, so by my deduction (and terrible math) that is 4032 single works of art in this video! Thanks for sharing this Triggerman.
April 22, 2011 @ 7:44 pm
That is poetry in motion.
April 22, 2011 @ 7:47 pm
I first heard of this a few months before discovering this site. I contributed back then, but have forgot about it. I’m glad it’s still going.
April 24, 2011 @ 8:44 am
I actually contributed some art work (as did some of my fellow Joe Kubert classmates) to this awhile back. It’s really quite stunning.
May 1, 2011 @ 6:18 am
It really says what the state of country music is in when this blog only gets six comments. Long live Johnny Cash.
May 3, 2011 @ 11:04 am
Wow! That’s beautiful!