A co-worker IM’ed me nothing more than an URL, and like every impulsive fool out on the ‘net, I blindly clicked on it out of sheer curiousity. Maybe you’ll do the same:
http://my.so-net.net.tw/carl0726/sand.wmv
I’m pretty speechless. Okay, that’s a lie, I can say lots of things about how cool this performance art is. But, rather than babble on and spoil the surprise, I’ll just hope you were tempted enough to click on the link so you can see exactly what I’m talking about.
Update, 11/20/2003: Seems like the original link is dead now (poor guy’s bandwidth must have been suffering). Here’s another link:
http://www.theposse.org/downloads/sand.wmv
I’ve got a copy myself but I don’t have a nice high-bandwidth place to post it (it’s 30.5MB in size), but if someone wants to host it, I’ll link to it.
Update, 11/26/2003: The folks at theposse.org have taken the video down and replaced it with a happy message. I’m not going to keep fishing for links to this video — if you haven’t seen it by now, then man, get with the program!
Update, 03/11/2005: It appears that over a year later, folks are still finding this entry when searching for “sand.wmv”, so I figured I’d better update it. In the comments below, RE provides a link to the sand animation artist, Ferenc Cako‘s website. His site features a page on his sand painting performance which has some links to the video but it’s broken up into separate small, low-quality files: sand_1.mpg, sand_2.mpg, erzekeny_toredekek.mpg, toredek.mpg, toredek_2.mpg. Enjoy!
Programmer, husband, father, singer, guitarist, tinkerer, reverse engineer, strange, and living in New Jersey. 
That was pretty amazing. I don’t know about the music, though. What a talent, and an excellent idea for presentation, as well.
You know, I had the sound muted so I didn’t even hear the music. Needless to say, the presentation was sufficient without any in my opinion.
The music is from “Kojiki”, a suite composed by a guy named Kitaro in the 80’s, inspired by The Kojiki, the Japanese creation myth.
Justy, am I the only one who finds it comical that some white guy is doing some wicked art to some Japanese music in *Korea*? Wonder how many people that might have tweaked …
hey, i had the chance to watch this over the weekend. come tuesday the link no longer is working. where could i find this again?
Looks like they took the link down. Google shows that someone mirrored it here:
http://www.theposse.org/downloads/sand.wmv
Thanks for pointing this out …
“Mirrored”. Har har. We mirrored it for our own readers, not everyone else in the god damned world. Bandwidth costs money. Movie has been replaced with a short informational video. (Not that I think this blog did any significant damage. There were literally sites all over the world leeching that thing.)
Temporal! Thanks for checking your referer logs. I actually never visited the link of theposse.org until you mentioned replacing it, so I had to go look. I’m still laughing … I was totally expecting animal porn or some slideshow starting with tubgirl.com or goatse.cx — but the “informational video” was much more tasteful and funny.
I know bandwidth costs money — that’s why I linked to you instead of putting it up on my own link. :-) I know, sorry, that was uncool. Still trying to find some “free web hosting” space out there that’s giving away 30 MB of space. :-P
Sorry for any grief my link caused you … from my click-through logs, there’s been a happy amount of folks we’ve gotten from Google that clicked through to theposse.org.
Fortunately no real harm was done. Somehow, through a series of freak events a few years ago, our hosts gave us a service plan that doesn’t officially exist, in which we get 100GB/mo. at an insanely low rate. sand.wmv only used up, like, 27GB of that, so we’re in the clear. It was a bit frustrating, though. We hit 10GB/day for three days in a row before we pulled the movie! But, yeah, in the end it didn’t hurt anyone.
One other member wanted to replace the video with actual porn, but I convinced him otherwise, knowing there were a lot of sites (like yours) that didn’t deserve that. Wouldn’t want a fellow coder geek to unknowingly be linking his/her/its readers to porn, along with a quote like “I’m pretty speechless. Okay, that’s a lie, I can say lots of things about how cool this performance art is.” :)
Sadly, I currently have no real bandwidth (sigh) so I wasn’t going to host sand.wmv on my own box … but if I did, I definitely was going to put HTTP referer checking in place to keep others from just linking to it, that’s for sure.
Cool, and thanks, from one “coder geek” to another.
referrer checking doesn’t work on wmv files thanks to windows media player
You’re right. Never actually looked at the header that Windows Media Player sends. I do notice however that it sends cookies. My hunch is only sends cookies that were set in Microsoft Internet Explorer, though … would have to experiment some more.
Indeed it is a amazing video both for how the music is incorprated into the art. The art itself is simply amazing alone, along with his other works
Here is another link for the video
http://mail.colocation.hinet.net/~happyman/funny/sand.wmv
In addition his site which has pictures and other short videos of his.
http://www.cakostudio.hu/
Oh and there is also this amazing display of music from a French guy:
http://leech.dk/maestro.wmv