Electric Man @ Colossal.

My Light is Your Life is a figurative sculpture by Czech artist Krištof Kintera made from an assortment of old lamps, light fixtures, and cables.

Galerie RABOUAN MOUSSION.

Wow, this is like an electronic version of Alex Grey!

Five minute project: Heart-Shaped Hack Box – Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

A hack-box to go, filled with interconnects, LEDs, and love. Because, what better way to say I love you, than with the gift of electronics?

An impression of the Ghent Lichtfestival 2012 (video).

ScratchML Data Spec @ F.A.T..

ScratchML, like GML, is an XML-based format for storing information about the position of the record and crossfader during a scratch performance.

This is a “beta” release of the .SML file format, with sample data for 1 turntable and 1 crossfader. The format is designed to accomodate multiple turntables and crossfaders and a wide variety of data capture techniques, but we’ve only field-tested it against the basic 1 deck + 1 mixer scratch setup, which is what we were working with this weekend.

The two most important fields are:

• <turntable> — stores data about the playback position on the record as a consistently sampled stream of floats, with <samplerate> samples per second.
• <fader> — stores data for crossfader movements, ranging from 0 (full-left) to 1 (full-right). This data is stored only when the fader actually moves, and is stored as <p> (position) and <t> (time) tuplets in the field.

N+ew | Rodrigo Alonso.

Sculpture-installation made of electronic waste, epoxy resin and cast aluminum. It is produced in limited editions, or based on specific orders. None is equal to the previous contents. Customizable.

The Rygo via EMSL.

We are combining high technology and high art to create something very special – the Rygo. Standing 2 meters tall, it will be the largest such 3D print of any type in North America (quite possibly the Western hemisphere) and will be installed for all the world to see at Gropp’s Gallery of Vancouver, Canada. Crowdfunding the Rygo reflects the best qualities of Vancouver – organic design supported by a grassroots movement. This is also an international effort! The Rygo will be printed in Italy by Enrico Dini’s DShape, itself the largest 3D printer of its kind, measuring 6 x 6 x 8 meters (20 x 20 x 27 ft). The Rygo was designed by famous 3D designer and sculptor Bathsheba Grossman of California, utilizing esoteric math and an artistic touch to craft a piece that would have been un-makeable by any other means. 

Everyone in this campaign truly believes that 3D printing will shake up everything you thought you knew about design, construction, manufacturing, architecture, sculpture….you name it. We hope you feel the same. Every contribution is going towards a leap in technology that happens only once a decade. 

Read more…

BIX Entertainment System on Vimeo.

PONG is an old-school arcade video game released by Atari in 1972 and was one of the first video games to reach mainstream popularity. The BIX Entertainment System brings this classic of computer entertainment to the media-facade of the Kunsthaus Graz and invites pedestrians to probe their PONG-skills right in front of the building under the open sky. While the successful original game concept is left untouched, the BIX Entertainment System drastically changes the dimensions of the original Atari-PONG with this large-scale realization on a huge media-facade and allows for sharing PONG-experiences with the open public.

8-voices mixed in the micro, with nothing on the output but an RC integrator.

What the heck is a “Fraunchpad”? Well, it’s similar to the Launchpad, but with FRAM (Ferroelectric RAM, not an oil filter). Specifically, it’s the MSP-EXP430FR5739. The song data is stored in the FRAM.

The source code and more info is available here.

Nice hack, oPossum!

Electronics assembly, as music video, via the forums!.

I did a brief post back in March 2011 about the Lumarca, a project by Matt Parker, Albert Hwang and Elliot Woods. However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t do a follow-up featuring this gorgeous short film about the project by Jason Scott. I’d be further remiss if I didn’t tell you that, if you’re in NYC, you can go see the Lumarca in person this week at Eyebeam.

Newly released NASA – “Blue Marble” photos via BB.

A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed ‘Suomi NPP’ on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.

Suomi NPP is NASA’s next Earth-observing research satellite. It is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth.

Suomi NPP is carrying five instruments on board. The biggest and most important instrument is The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS.

Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

Origami Masks and Tessellations by Joel Cooper @ Colossal.

Paper artist Joel Cooper folds these astounding masks and tessellations from single pieces of paper.

YEARS on Vimeo.

A record player that plays slices of wood.
Modified record player, wood, sleeves. 2011
Thanks to: Pro-ject Audio, Karla Spiluttini, Ivo Francx, Rohol

http://traubeck.com/

Adafruit Industries – “Ladyada’s E is for Electronics” A to Z of Electronics coloring book! has been something we’ve been working on for awhile, we needed to take a break over the holidays but now we’re progressing nicely. This page is our work-in-progress page that you can check out to see things as-they-happen. You’ll see sketches, drafts and notes between Limor, Phil and Robert.

A beautifully done camera motion controller project:

Andreas Böhler and Anja Hartig, two fellow students and I, are currently working on ‘A Game of Choices’, an interactive claymation flash-game. We built different clay-sets, that the stop motion animated character will later walk through. In order to achieve a smooth walk-through experience, we photographed the 100 cm wide set in 200 highly precise steps. When it comes to precision photography, one can find dozens of systems available. However, professional systems are expensive and therefore out of reach for this project.

As I had recently begun playing with the open-source hardware-platform Arduino, I decided to take it a step further and build a single axis motion control myself. The basic configuration was quickly developed and assembled, however, it presented some severe issues. For example, the shafts were too weak to handle heavy lenses, as the platform would lean to one side. I had to reinforce the system with a second set of shafts that now allows it to handle up to 3 kg of mounted weight.

…
If you don’t have great knowledge about electronics, you might want to look into some basics or you’re most probably going to blow up some chips and LEDs – at least that’s what I did… After all, this project was fun and very interesting as it was my first step into the world of physical computing. The possibilities are exciting and I can’t wait to start my next Arduino project – right now, I’m just spoiled for choice.

No project details yet, though it’s still a nice proof-of-concept for this kind of thing.

Level 4 Access Kit. Nice packaging via Twitter…

The brand new album produced by TMBG’s John Flansburgh, lots of new songs, each one more awesome than the last.

Self-Portrait Diagrams by Minjeong An @ Colossal.

CNC halftones with ASCII art @ Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. So cool!

Seeing these examples reminded us of another “classic” method of making halftones:ASCII art. In what follows, we walk through the process of using making CNC halftones for engraving or carving from both vintage and automatically generated ASCII art.

Seldom seen nowadays, ASCII art is a computer graphics technique where grayscale photos or artwork are represented by keyboard characters on a regularly spaced grid. And while it does show up occasionally in the history of computer graphics, it is perhaps more important as a cultural artifact of the BBS era of computer networking.

This little documentary about a paper dealer and a press printer in Los Angeles is full of skill and pride and hardship. You should watch it.

[via Jason Scott]

nicholas hanna: water calligraphy device @ designboom -

‘water calligraphy device’ by canada-born, beijing-based media artist nicholas hanna reinterprets the chinese tradition of using a water brush to write poetry in public spaces by transforming a flat-bead tricycle into a poetry-writing device.

http://www.nicholashanna.net/

“Weeping Woman” by Picasso

Remaking famous art with photographs via Waxy…

Fireplace via Waxy.

mate cosies: warm hands, cold mate. fabienne writes -

I’m offering a small run of mate cosies: “warm hands, cold mate” for this winter season. Each mate cosy is produced on my hacked kh930 knitting machine, by hand by me (the machine isn’t motorized yet) and then finished by hand by me. They are available in this limited run (probably around 40 pieces total) for a price of 60 euros for either black/white or black/red. If you would like a special order QR code on the front of your black/white cosy, that will cost 80 euros. The QR codes don’t really work very consistently since little knit v’s are not easily recognized as square pixels. They sort of work in the dark. You could improve this by writing a QR code reader filter that “sees” v’s as pixels. If you are the first to code such a filter, or if you are the first to code up any other means for creating readable QR codes for knitting, and you open source the code, I will give a cosy to you for free.

Anyone who has ever tried to edit video with one of the many NLE software packages would appreciate this. There’s so much “stuff” you can do during editing now that goes beyond the simple cut + splice. Often that stuff just gets in the way. This is a lovely solution — a Moviola-type interface for digital video streams. From Nate Rudolph:

I graduated last year with a bachelor’s degree in what is called “Film Studies,” because a majority of the movies we watched and wrote about were shot on film. I also grew up in what will be the last generation to have seen a major motion picture premiere that was originally shot and edited on film. As I re-read Murch’s book this semester I was struck by how it knit together my previous education of film with my new path as a student of design and technology. His work clearly laid out the advantages and disadvantages of both film and video; and though certain problems associated with video have been remedied by more reliable computing environments, the connection to a “kinetic feedback” with video footage has become increasingly distant. My project, the Videola, is an attempt to reclaim that connection.

I decided to focus the Videola’s function to the primary decision made by an editor: where to cut. Murch compares this task to that of a gunslinger; focusing with one’s entire body, waiting for the perfect moment to begin and end a scene.

…

The Videola project opens the way to numerous avenues of exploration. The primary concern in further iterations is to contain all the functions of the machine into a succinct apparatus. A USB port built into the body of the machine would allow the user to swap ‘reels’ without handling the computer itself. A projector built into the workings of the machine would strengthen the connection of user and medium by removing the distraction of a physical monitor. Once these aesthetic concerns have been addressed, it will be possible to move to questions of function. Instead of the workflow ending in the physical world, perhaps the Videola could upload completed pieces to YouTube, Vimeo, or Facebook; retaining the mobility of video without sacrificing the physical connection in the edit process.

In every iteration it is my hope that users who experience working with the Videola will feel an emotional connection not only with the footage they are editing but also with the history of film editing itself. Future colleagues of mine may very soon have diplomas with “Video Studies,” inked on them, but it will be my goal to ensure that whatever medium we use can still be a passionate and beautiful representation of the many stories the future will have to tell.

Pixel animals by Shawn Smith via colossal…

Kinetic Sculpture @ ITP… The are the solenoids we have in our store. Ben Light writes -

Here is a quick video of my Physical Computing final. The kinetic sculpture is a series of 5 pendulums that are controlled by the viewer. When one waves there hand over a sensor, a pendulum is fired. It is kind of addictive.

alley posts via Beyond the Beyond.

an old tourist movie from the future.

filmed in an evening walking the streets of Barcelona with a handheld 3d scanner.

made in openFrameworks — edited in screenflow

The track is a segment of ionoscan by Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto off of their summvs collaboration.

if you like it, consider downloading the source file as the compression destroys much of the detail

scribbled line digital portraits.

blending programming, design, and photography the ‘cinema-flash showdown’ is a series of digital photographic works created by american designers ayaka ito and randall church while students at the college of imaging arts and sciences at rochester institute of technology (RIT).

Modified 1937 Underwood Standard typewriter, oil on paper by Tyree Callahan via colossal.

Awesome! From the Cambridge Digital Library:

Cambridge University Library holds the largest and most important collection of the scientific works of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). We present here an initial selection of Newton’s manuscripts, concentrating on his mathematical work in the 1660s. Over the next few months we will be adding further works until the majority of our Newton Papers are available on this site.

Newton was closely associated with Cambridge. He came to the University as a student in 1661, graduating in 1665, and from 1669 to 1701 he held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics. Under the regulations for this Chair, Newton was required to deposit copies of his lectures in the University Library. These, and some correspondence relating to the University, were assigned the classmarks Dd.4.18, Dd.9.46, Dd.9.67, Dd.9.68, and Mm.6.50.

This is great news, and the books themselves are quite beautiful!

Measuring Angst – Robotic installation via colossal…

Birth and death are only a rewind button away. This is a world where meaning is found in a videotape. That videotape can be both rewound and fast forwarded, endlessly replaying the best events again and again. Will the physical world eventually be subject to the same rules?

This sculpture is made possible via a system of armatures similar to those one might find within the prehistoric animal exhibits in a natural history museum. They will differ in that they will be mechanically driven and allow for varying positions of the broken marble pieces. A system of electronic drives, stepper motors, ballscrews, linear shafts and computer software similar to what one might find in a high-tech assembly plant provides the movement.  

Festivize your bench this holiday season with an oscilloscope Christmas tree:

When I was a little kid, my dad worked at Bell Labs. Every year around Christmas, we’d go visit him at work. One memory which has always stuck with me from my holiday visits was seeing a Christmas tree on an oscilloscope. I was pretty amazed by it. Engineers are a funny bunch — they tend to celebrate holidays in the most uniquely nerdy and wonderful ways, just like kids. When I recently acquired a new ‘scope and wanted to familiarize myself with it, I knew exactly what my test circuit was going to be.

In honor of the nameless BTL engineer whose scope scribbling captivated me as a child, here we are. Maybe the same thing will happen for some other kid. There are a lot of holiday parties coming up. You could put this on one of your scopes at work or at your hackerspace, and some other kid will see it, and it’ll fire their imagination too. It looks pretty neat at any rate, and it’s downright fascinating after a few fortified egg nogs.

Schematics, code and further ramblings over on my blog.

A little drop of magic…

They look as delicate as jellyfish and as strange as something from another planet . . . but all these magical images were created by nothing more than drops of liquid colliding, and were captured by a digital camera in a makeshift studio.

Corrie White, 63, has spent many hours perfecting the art of liquid-drop photography but admits that many of her amazing images are ‘flukes’.

Mrs White took up the hobby only three years ago, before which she was content to take standard snaps of her four children and nine grandchildren. But she was ‘mesmerised’ when she stumbled across the work of US photographer Martin Waugh, who creates what he  calls ‘liquid sculpture’, and decided to begin her own experiments.

Crystalline. Robert writes -

This project revisits the code originally created for the Written Images project. There were some aspects of the code which always frustrated me that I didn’t know how to address at the time. In reworking this code, I finally figured out how to deal with large numbers of point lights in GLSL shaders as well as getting a better handle on dealing with the magnetic field itself. Previous versions used a rotation matrix to try and whip and spin the magnetic field into interesting forms. This was not an ideal solution. So I gutted the magnetism code and restructured it so that I wouldn’t need to rely on tricks. The results are quite promising.

Crystalline was made with the Cinder C++ framework.

Artist Kang Duck-Bong via colossal…

Simulated Knitting. David writes -

Alternate title: I’m a big fan of the Fruchterman & Reingold graph embedding algorithm.

Recently I created a site for trying to predict the pattern of colors in pooled knitting. Next I wanted to be able to predict the shape of a knitted object

Read more…

The project concept here is pretty simple — it’s basically a motorized turntable for taking 360-degree photos of objects — but this video is just superb. From Scriblab Studios:

I thought its time to learn something new in my sparetime so the TurnMachine is my first attemp in building usefull machines with the help of the Arduino development plattform. Arduino is an electronics plattform made especially for artists and people who want to learn microcontroller programming the first time without the hassle of studying electronics in depth. I build this as a finger exercise for future projects and ideas for physical computing and art.

Furthermore I would really like to build more physical modells in Fimo/Clay etc. for concept design so I needed a nice and automated way of making a presentation of these. In a nutshell: the machine turns the table in a predefined step length (eg. 25 steps, its capable of a max. of 200 steps per revolution, min. step size 1.9°), sends a signal to the attached camera which then takes a photo and turns to the next step until it has finished the choosen steps. Im a big fan of automation softwarewise, so I love the idea of automate physical things!

Nicely done.

Happy Birthday Georges Méliès! Today would be the 150th birthday of French film-maker and cinema pioneer Georges Méliès. Over a century before we would begin using terms like ‘disruptive’ and ‘paradigm shifting’ to describe projects which alter the way we perceive the possibilities in the world around us, Méliès was doing just that.

Most people who know of Méliès at all know him through his film Le Voyage Dans La Lune (above, top). Considered the first science fiction film, it is a landmark in the history of cinema because it was one of the first films to use special effects to enhance and further the narrative. Most ‘narrative’ movies of this time period were little more than stage plays filmed with a camera. The original ‘big idea’ of motion pictures was that they could provide a record of an event.  With Méliès, the motion picture became the event, by using the characteristics of film as a medium to tell the story.

There are many parallels between what Georges Méliès did with cinema and what new artists are doing today with emerging technologies. Augmented Reality artist and researcher Helen Papagiannis has spoken on the point several times that AR is currently at a time in it’s history which is an analogue to the point cinema was at when Méliès began his work:

Underwater ink photography – Aqueous Fluoreau by mark mawson via colossal.

Timeless Beautiful Industrial Design by Braun GmbH @ webexpedition18.

Braun GmbH, formerly Braun AG, is a German consumer products company based in Kronberg, Germany. From the mid-1950s, the Braun brand was closely linked with the concept of German modern industrial design and its combination of functionality and technology. In 1956, Braun created its first design department, headed by Dr. Fritz Eichler, who instituted a collaboration with the Ulm School of Design to develop a new product line.

Amazing pieces of industrial design that still today remain fresh, true classics that have survived the test of time.

Related:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braun_(Elektroger%C3%A4te)#Braun_Lectron
http://www.braun.com/global/world-of-braun/braun-collection.html

Frosty Ice Tube Nice photo from our very own Johngineer.

Flowering bulbs: Artist’s bright idea to create magical field of 5,000 Christmas lights @ Mail Online via NOTCOT.

Cities, towns and tourist attraction usually recruit a celebrity to switch on their Christmas lights. But when The Holburne Museum in Bath had a bright idea for this year’s festive decorations, they recruited an artists instead. The stunning Field of Lights is the work of acclaimed lighting expert Bruce Munro…

Awesome project using RGB LED strips, with electronics designed by Interactive Matter:

You may know that the whole spring and summer has been a bit quiet over here at Interactive Matter. And again for a reason. I was asked by a friend to build the electronics for a massive LED installation for the  ‘Hsinchu Biomedical Science Park Exhibition Center’.

The result was very impressive: An 10 meter long installation, consisting of 30 moving triangles with controllable RGB LEDs in them, acting as a moving display.

A XMOS controller driving 60 stepper motors,  with about 100 meters of HL1606 digitally controlled LED strips composing a moving LED matrix of  30×102 pixels. The concept and design was done by Taiwanese partners. Interactive Matter only provided the electronics and programming.

…

The basic idea was simple: The XMOS XC-2 kit has 4 processing cores, three of them having two 12 pin connectors. So each core can support 16 HL1606 LED strips (some control pins and 8 data pins per connector, with two connectors per core). Due to the parallel architecture of the XMOS controllers it was very easy to create some scalable implementation for the HL1606 driver). Implementing the driver was also quite a breeze since adafruit hosts the datasheet there are some good Arduino tutorials for this. The big problem was that the HL1606 only supports 2 grayscale levels, while it was only practical to use just 1 bit control (on or off). So this called for some kind of software controlled PWM. The lenght of the strip and the communication speed controls the update rate of the LED strip. And especially the communication speed varies widely with electric noise, cable length, power supply quality and so on. The solution to this was to implement some pulse density modulation. By this the grey scale modulation the color depth automatically adapts to the image refresh rate on the LEDs. The faster the update of the LED strip in comparison to the update of the RGB data displayed on the LED strip, the higher the perceived color depth. Nice (and necessary).

This is an amazing and beautiful project!

*note that the RGB LED strips in the shop are now controlled with LPD8806 chips, which provide considerably more subtle color control than the HL1606′s.

Made by Woouf. Now somebody needs to make a Moog bunk bed — you get to the top bunk by climbing a transistor ladder.

[MATRIXSYNTH by way of Chris Novello]

The first is this cute and thoughtful infographic (above – click the image for the full version) from onlineengineeringdegree.com, which paints a lamentable (if not surprising) picture of the state we’re in. The second, created by Knewton and originally posted on the Daily Kos, further addresses the problem:

The citation of Pete Conrad in the second ‘graphic really drives home the point that “standard” educational models can fail even for (perhaps especially for) the most talented of us. At the bottom of the the first graphic is another statement I can get behind; that “big lecture classes are cheap, but their dullness and rote memorization drive students away from STEM” — so very true (and sad).

Feel free to post your own thoughts in the comments!

Both of these originally via techi.com (h/t Akiba)

Over at NYC Resistor, Trammell and Adam decided to upgrade the space with some ambient lighting, controlled by their hexascroller display via a Teensy. Trammell writes:

Adam and I upgraded Hexascroller to control 5 m of Adafruit RGB LED strip through a spare serial port connected to a Teensy 2.0 that drives the strip via SPI. Now when a new message is displayed, the accent lights switch to a bright flashing mode to attract attention, then they will return to soothing, slow color changing mode.

Nice work, guys!

Off Book: Generative Art – Computers, Data and Humanity…

An intriguing combination of programmers, artists, and philosophers, these creators embrace a process that delegates essential decisions to computers, data sets, or even random variables. This allows important metaphors to arise in their work, calling attention to the relationship between humans and the computers that surround us, the mountains of information we generate, and the powerful impact that technology has on our relationships with each other.

Featuring:
Luke Dubois, Generative Composer
Scott Draves, Generative Artist
Will Wright, Game Designer

The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face @ NeuroTribes.

Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas. In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now*, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing – each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.

Read more.