“Imagination” by Felicia Chiao. All images © the artists, shared with permission

Returning to the Japanese American National Museum for the fifth time, the Giant Robot Biennale showcases a diverse selection of artworks from Asian and Asian American creatives. The show’s lineup includes an array of artists including Giorgiko, Taylor Lee, Luke Chueh, and others previously featured on Colossal such as Rain Szeto and Felicia Chiao.

Originally created in the ’90s by Eric Nakamura as a magazine, Giant Robot …

The Black Music History Library is a list of resources (books, articles, podcasts, films, etc.) about the Black origins of popular and traditional music. From the about page:

There are many notable archives doing similar work, yet it isn’t uncommon for some to have a limited view of Black music — one which fuels US-centrism and a preference for vernacular music traditions. This collection considers the term “Black music” more widely, as it aims to address any instances in which Black participation led to …

Using crowd-sourced clips sent in from all over the world, filmmakers Ivan Cash and Jacob Jonas made a poignant short film called A Social Distance about how things are going as people shelter in place at home.

In the self-submitted videos, people dance, play music, take us on a tour of their refrigerator, and introduce us to their pets. Edited together, these intimate moments create a synchronicity of humanity — a feeling of togetherness that’s difficult to conjure when you’re sequestered at home.

The …

Some people feel helpless & anxious.

Some people are bored.

Some people are self-quarantined alone and are lonely.

Some people are realizing that After will be very different from Before.

Some people are really enjoying this extra time with their kids and will miss it when it’s over.

Some people just got off their 12th double shift in a row at the hospital and can’t hug their family.

Some people visited their favorite restaurant for the last time and didn’t realize it.

Some people have died from …

From filmmaker Marshall Curry, The Neighbor’s Window is a poignant short film about the odd relationships you can sometimes form with your neighbors in big cities, even if you never meet in real life.

For real! Do they have jobs? Or clothes? All they do is host dance parties and sleep ‘til noon and screw.

This film recently won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. (via open culture)

Update: I forgot to mention that this film was based on a true story told by Diane Weipert on the Love + …

Gorgeous work by a Polish illustrator working in Japan. Originally found him through this page about his Tokyo storefronts book, which features a number of super detailed watercolor illustrations. You can see even more on the series page and the Tokyo by night ones are also worth a long look. He also links to this very detailed review of the storefronts book, with a page by page description (sounds boring but the work is so beautiful, it goes by fast).

Urbanowicz also has a Youtube channel with lots of …

So a funny thing happened on Twitter this week, which almost changed the world a little bit.

Someone sent me a beautiful 3-D mockup of a fictional, car-free city of 50,000 people, set in the scenic nook of land* between Boulder, Colorado and Longmont, where I live. It came complete with street plans, detailed descriptions and dozens of cool photos, both real and computer-generated, showing how it would feel to live there. They called it Cyclocroft, in honor of the generally pro-bike stance of Mustachian …

Two well-heeled ladies chat about musicals near Lincoln Center. An elderly man bows an erhu in a deserted corner of the Lorimer Street stop. At Jay Street, two kids put pink plastic buckets on their heads and chant, “We’re going to the beach! We’re going to the beach!”

The short film Stations: A Quick Scan Through NYC races through 120 of the MTA’s stops, marrying scripted interactions with chance encounters, such as passengers yelping as they’re pelted by rain outside of the Astoria Boulevard station.

“I …

YouTube has been an existence-proof of forms of video that were lurking in potentia, unable to come into existence due to limitations of the distribution channel. The two-to-three-minute video has now been firmly established as a genre (with the six-second video hot on its heels), but there's plenty of room at the long end of the scale. Case in point: subculture of YouTubers who post full-length train journeys, hours and hours' worth -- and if that's not long-form enough, how about 134-hour sea crossings? …