today and tomorrow

Alexis Malbert a.k.a. TapeTronic knows how to handle oldskool audio cassettes. The first video shows you his different scratch cassettes, the second one some weird customised tapes and tapedecks.

Last week, F.A.T. introduced the Graffiti Markup Language (GML), a new XML file type specifically designed for archiving graffiti tags. Of course it doesn’t make sense to only archive those tags, you should also be able to reproduce them. And that’s exactly what Golan Levin and Jeremy Ficca did. They wrote a small tool to translate the .GML files from 000000book.com into instructions for their industrial ABB IRB-4400 robot arm. If they now could place his robot on a truck like Evan Roth suggested …
Here you can find some more details about the Robotagger.

Night Lights is the most amazing interactive projection on a building I have ever seen. YesYesNo were asked to turn the Auckland Ferry Building into an interactive playground for the viewers. There were 3 different types of interaction – body interaction on the two stages, hand interaction above a light table, and phone interaction with the tracking of waving phones. That input was then used to manipulate 6 different scenes. Just watch the video and you’ll know why this is a very impressive project. Here are the names of some of the people involved, some might sound familiar if you reading today and tomorrow: Joel Gethin Lewis, Zach Lieberman, Pete Hellicar, Kyle McDonald, Todd Vanderlin, Daito Manabe.

The Senstor reminded me of another project called Outerspace, I’m so surprised that I didn’t post this before. It was a project which Andre Stubbe and Markus Lerner did during their time at the UDK Berlin in 2004.
Outerspace is a reactive robotic creature with animal-like behaviour. It can react to humans thanks to the photo sensors in the top part and capacitory sensors that react to human body contact. There’re some nice videos on the website showing this interaction.

The Senster was a robotic sculpture developed by Edward Ihnatowicz in the late 60’s. It was commisioned by Philips and part of their permanent showplace, the Evoluon, in Eindhoven between 1970 and 1974. It was the first robotic sculpture to be controlled by a computer and could react to the behaviour of the visitors with its sound and movement sensors. The computer used to control The Senster was a Philips P9201 and had only 8K of core memory. Now, almost 40 years later, every interaction student could make something like this and fit the logic in a small box. But this is still an amazing project.

This was the control panel of the Senster.

rediscovered this during the rAndom international talk at the designtransfer event of the UDK Berlin

Gijs Gieskens is a Dutch VJ and musician who likes to make his own tools, both on the hardware and the software side. Browser Jockey is one of his projects, he wrote a set of browser scripts which he uses to generate visuals to live music. Gijs developed another tool to use with Browser Jockey: the Beat Converter. This is a little piece of hardware which translates live mucis to key presses and trigger the Browser Jockey scripts. This video explains it all.

“Untitled Sound Objects” is a series of sound installations by Zimoun an Pe Lang. They use computer controlled small machines and robots, in combination with different materials which are used as sound sources. This video gives you a nice overview.

This video shows you some of the test objects and experiments they did.

This last one called “Woodworms I” by Zimoun, is nothing more than a piece of wood, a microphone, a soundsystem and woodworms.

Electronic Popables is a project by Jie Qi, a mechanical engineering student at Columbia University. But last summer she spend researching with Dr. Leah Buechley as part of the High-Low Tech group in the MIT Media Lab and there she did this project. You could describe it as a classic paper pop-up book filled with electronic components. The LED’s and other elements are connected to arduino based boards through conductive ink. So when something moves, the circuit closes and something happens. But this videos shows will make everything clear.

In this next video, Hannah Perner-Wilson shows you how she made a paper piano.

Another project by Jie Qi are these paper flowers. She built-in some memory wires in the paper flowers connected them to a strong battery. Those wires let the flowers move, just like they would bloom.

found @zachlieberman

The piano in this video can speak, I kid you not. The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger transformed the voice of a child reciting the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court into MIDI events. Those events let the mechanically-controlled piano play the voice of that child.
This is video is German but it has English captions, the text that the piano is playing is in English.
Hearing is believing.

found @golan

I don’t know much about zonk out except that he plays around with video mixers, processors and video synthesizer. This set “Video Stills” is just awesome.