Entirely by accident I happened across this video (Link) a couple of days ago of a “sand painting” performance from the SICAF Seoul 2003 conference.

Out of curiousity I went surfing for some background since obviously it’s a few years old and I should have seen it earlier (I’ve been interested in sand animation since the 1970’s and this would have caught my attention had I read about it). Was it not posted on some of the sites I regularly visit?

Well, after a bit of research, it’s apparent that it was mentioned… plenty of times. It just slipped past me somehow; perhaps lost in the noise of the internet. And it might have been lost to me forever, except now I notice that you can also find it on Google Video (Link), on LookAtEntertainment.com (Link), on non-video hosting niche websites, and probably on plenty of other sites. It seems as if the recent introduction of video hosting services has helped this one to crawl up the “Long Tail” further and further from the niche circles that originally took notice of it and into my Sphere of Reception.

This now gets me to wondering if I’ll ever see Mark Sullivan’s Super 8mm short “Nightspeed” (don’t bother looking for it on either his personal IMDb profile or his business IMDb profile; he made it sometime around 1979-80 while he was still a talented kid).

I also wonder what would happen if his film were uploaded to one of the viral-video hosting sites. Could it be tracked without the conspiracy-theorists out there crying DRM-foul? Seems like injecting the distribution bloodstream with some old-content dye markers could yield some fascinating insight into how online distribution systems are evolving. While I’ve no doubt whole businesses are set up to do this very thing with new content, I’m guessing no one is really tracking the old stuff like this sand art performance video.

Well, in any event, if anyone knows where I can find his “Nightspeed” short online, I’d pay to finally see that thing.

I wonder if I’m a market of one.

(p.s. – If you’ve not seen the sand performance video, it’s both safe for work and entertaining)

{Image source: some uncredited video of the performance}