today and tomorrow

Tengu is a small USB gadget that lip-syncs to music, your voice or … Neat! The brave out there who want to build one themselves should go here.

Moritz Waldemeyer was featured in the BBC Culture Show a few weeks ago. He is a designer / inventor … he does cutting edge things with LED’s etc.; he is the guy behind Hussein Chalayans fashion technology. So for those of you who missed it, you can now watch it here.

‘Design and the Elastic Mind‘ is an exhibition at MoMA, New York, about the relation between science and design. I think this is one of the most exciting subjects these days and I would love to go and check out that exhibition. Fortunately, tha ltd. build this website where you can find over 300 projects. The navigation may seem a little awkward at first, but once you get the hang of it …

Hussein Chalayan did some amazing things in the past. Remember that mechanical dress, or the LED display thing and of course the Readings film from last season. So what did he came up with for Fall Winter 08/09? Well see for yourself, fast forward this video to 04:00. Maybe some better footage will popup later, so we can have a better look at it.

And for those of you who want to see to first part too: go here.

‘Absolut Machines‘ is quite an amazing project by Absolut Vodka. Basically, Absolut commissioned 2 interactive sound sculptures, which you can control through the website, you’ll have to wait in line though.
‘Absolut Quartet’ is a robotic mechanical orchestra, by playing the piano you can inspire the 3 robotic ‘musicians’. You can find some making of pictures in this Flickr set. The other one, ‘Absolut Choir’ is a machine consisting of 22 choir members, by typing in words and sentences you inspire them to sing. Both are just amazing!
On the website you can choose from different camera angles, see some documentation, download your composition as a video etc. It’s just a pain to use it. I think it’s a shame that the website doesn’t match the quality of the installations.
Here is a tip, just go to the press website if you want to get straight to the info.

‘You Don’t Matter’ converted a plotting machine into an output device, that can draw, scratch or cut with almost any traditional drawing technique, in order to achieve aesthetics looking neither drawn by hand nor produced with only a computer. Most interesting and inspiring are all the little mistakes this machine produces, because of too much data, too much water, color, pressure etc. There are always gradients because the color gets less and less as the machine draws on. This expansion space describes the machine’s actual identity. No Image looks like the other.
And if you put a camera infront of the machine and take a time exposure it draws with light in the air like Picasso did with his hand.

found at manystuff.org

Yeah, that’s a mobile phone. Well actually it’s a development circuit board for the google Android operating system by Qualcomm. Can you see an iPhone competitor in there?
More info and hardware porn shots at Wired’s Gadget Lab.

Karl Klomp is a Dutch media-artist - vj - theater technician. He knows how to modify video hardware and even build it from scratch. The output: glitch art.

But also hardware tools like this ‘Minimal Video Mixer’. Pure hardware porn.

Troika, known for their SMS Guerrilla Projector, was commissioned by Artwise Curators to create a signature piece at the entrance of the new British Airways luxury lounges in Heathrow Terminal 5. The result: ‘Cloud’, a five meter long digital sculpture whose surface is covered with 4638 flip-dots that can be individually addressed by a computer to animate the entire skin of the sculpture. The best part is of course the development pictures and 2 videos of the cloud in action.

This is probably the coolest homemade music sequencer. Made by Roman Haefeli.

A software-sequencer controls 8 solenoids, that knock on different things and therefore produce some rhythmic noise. Made with puredata, an arduino board and a selfmade relayboard to control the solenoids.

found at DE:BUG