Cyberpunks, a small subculture, influenced by the work of the author William Gibson and particularly the film Bladerunner, existed in London in the early 1990s. I became interested and photographed a series of about fifty portraits in my studio over a short period.
Our friend Catarina came up with this neat project called “Piano Box“, which uses capacitive sensing to make a paper piano keyboard, then generates the appropriate tones using the Tone library on the Arduino. From the NYCR blog:
The piano box is a (somewhat polyphonic) paper toy synthesizer with 12 keys, each triggering a tone and an LED. The keys are a set of capacitive sensors, made of copper tape, controlled by an Arduino Mega running the CapSense and Tone libraries. The code for this project, written by Will Byrd and Catarina Mota, can be downloaded here. Please note that the current version of the Tone library has some problems on Arduino 1.0. so it’s best to use version 23 or earlier.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this was the roll-up piano from that TNG episode. I love the idea of using cap sensing and paper — it opens up a world of possibilities for user interaction without prohibitive costs! Nice work, Catarina!
Following an International Visiting Artist Fellowship, Jessica was awarded an Arts Council Wales and Wales Arts International grant to undertake a research and development project at Urban Glass, New York. Collaborating with internationally renowed glass artists and neon specialists she produced new sculptural anatomical neon artwork inspired by biological electricity, the prescence of natural electrical activity in the human body.
Blown glass human organs encapsulate inert gases displaying different colours under the influence of an electric current. The human anatomy is a complex, biological system in which energy plays a vital role. Brain Wave conveys neurological processing activity as a kinetic and sensory, physical phenomena through its display of moving electric plasma. Optic Nerve shows a similar effect, more akin to the blood vessels of the eye and with a front ‘lens’ magnifiying the movement and the intensity of light. Heart is a representation of the human heart illuminated by still red neon gas.Electric Lungs is a more technically intricate structure with xenon gas spreading through its passage ways, communicating our human unawareness of the trace gases we inhale in our breathable atmosphere.
Wandering around Etsy I came across these wonderful pieces by TheBlueKraken. While computer waste jewelry is not a new idea, sometimes you see it done so well, and combined thoughtfully with silver and enamel work, that you just have to share it.
Computer scientist Ivan Sutherland once called a computer display “a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland.” and I have always aspired to walk in this wonderland to interact with those abstract beings..
Caspar Lam and YuJune Park, both Yale graduates who make up the Synoptic Office . They have explored the physical form of the language and thereby created a topography of the alphabet. All letters will be expressed on a square of 6 × 6 inches, and can therefore in any direction, up, down, left and right are thrown together and read.
An object is seen when our eyes capture light that is reflected from the object. If we extract just the light that is reflected from “something,” are we still in the presence of that “something”?
Using contours of light, I try to express this “something.”
While wandering through the AT&T Archives Techchannel I came across this neat film from 1968. The general tone of the film is the standard “gee whiz computers are amazing look what they can do” pitch, but some of the specific examples chosen here are pretty neat. The one which really caught my eye is the first example: schematic capture and circuit simulation using a CRT and lightpen. While circuit simulation had been done on computers since the first analog models, this is probably the oldest example I’ve seen of using a computer for graphical schematic capture and output (in this case, a frequency response plot). Even though this is an early example, it’s got a sort of elegance to it — if you look closely you’ll even see it’s got some drag-and-drop functionality.
The sections of the film that follow cover other things like creating animated movies (tell me the ‘graphic artist’ doesn’t look like Dennis Hopper), creating ASCII art (though perhaps not explicitly ASCII) and generating music and speech. There’s a lot to absorb here — definitely worth 15 minutes of your time — so check it out!
John Locke thinks people should read more. So in the past few months, the Columbia architecture grad has slipped around Manhattan with a sack of books and custom-made shelves, converting old pay phones into pop-up libraries.
Julius von Bismarck is only 28 years old, but his artistic resumé is already several pages long. He’s currently taking time off from school to be the new artist in residence at CERN – the world’s biggest particle physics research facility, home of the Large Hadron Collider. On Wednesday, von Bismarck will deliver a major public address at CERN’s Globe for Science and Innovation.
Von Bismarck won the top prize at Ars Electronica in 2008 for an ingenious device he called theImage Fulgurator, a hacked camera that injected stealth images into other people’s photos when they weren’t looking. In his striking project Public Face I, he mounted a giant neon smiley above the city of Berlin; the smiley changed its expression based on an estimate of the city’s mood that day.
…
Von Bismarck’s two-month artist residency at CERN – the first installment in the new “Collide @ CERN” program, created by CERN cultural specialist Ariane Koek – will pave the way for more artists to visit CERN in the future.
“I think the concept of putting an artist somewhere totally different is good,” von Bismarck said. “I don’t believe in the concept of a lot of artists hanging out in the same place, just doing art about art about art. I think it’s good to mix it up.”
There are drawbots, and then there are drawbots. Tim Noble created this “semi-automatic” chalkboard drawbot, built around laser-cut plywood, 3-D printed drive gears, MakerBot electronics, and a lovely old oak blackboard frame. I’ll readily admit that this thing fills me with awe and terror at the same time. I’m not sure why. The idea of an automatic blackboard seems kind of ancient and sinister, and this one is exceedingly well done.
Printable catalog (PDF) or (EPUB)
FEED