Demon computer hacker John Walker recently figured out a way to control his digital camera via the USB line that lesser mortals use to simply upload their pictures. He pointed his camera at the sky near Fourmi Lab World Headquarters above Switzerland's Lake Neuchatel, and ran a little program that took a picture ever minute or so all day long, munging them into a single *.AVI format movie file.
Here's the link to view the Cloud movie. http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/timelapse/movies/2004-09-06.avi
Be aware that it's a large file, so you'll initially see a blank movie-player screen for a minute or two.
I had been claiming, before Walker actually carried out the experiment, that the movies would look like 3C Belousov-Zhabotinsky cellular automata, but actually they look a bit more like the rule called Brian's Brain.
After looking at Walker's movie, my antic SF friend Marc Laidlaw (anagram: Ira Madclaw), comments:
“Walker's movie reminded me of a big photo essay book I saw, by the guy who did all those pictures of the White Sands test sites, I guess he moved to the East Bay and set up a camera on his porch and took year round pictures of the Bay, looking toward the Golden Gate bridge. All the pictures have the exact same framing, the same subject, so all that changes is everything else. It's essentially a very boring and pretentious book; but in typical pretentious artist style, because the images are all expertly printed and the book is nicely bound, it becomes an interesting artifact of sorts.”
“I wanted to do something similar, where I mount a camera in front of a TV and take a photo of my television set, a particular channel, every single day for a year. And then make a coffee table book out of that. But I don't think I have the marketing angle figured out yet.”