I guess you all remember Daito Manabe his Electric Stimulus project where he stimulated his facial muscles with small electric pulses, synced to music. Daito and Masaki Teruoka developed the next step of this system. Together with myoelectric sensors, they can make music by tapping on each other’s skin. Just watch the video!
One Hundred and Eight is an interactive installation made by Nils Völker. It’s made out of ordinary garbage bags which can be selectively inflated and deflated by two cooling fans.
Although each plastic bag is mounted stationary the sequences of inflation and deflation create the impression of lively and moving creatures which waft slowly around like a shoal. But as soon a viewer comes close it instantly reacts by drawing back and tentatively following the movements of the observer. As long as he remains in a certain area in front of the installation it dynamically reacts to the viewers motion. As soon it does no longer detect someone close it reorganizes itself after a while and gently restarts wobbling around.
Tessel is a kinetic installation investigating the perception of sound and space made by David Letellier & Lab[au]. A 4 by 2 meters big mirror is divided into 40 triangles. Twelve of them are fitted with motors and eight triangles are equipped with audio transducers, which transform the surface into a dynamic sonic space.
Lipstick Enigma is a computer-driven sentence-generator made by Janet Zweig. The sculpture is made of 1200 resin lipsticks powered by 1200 stepper motors, controlled by 60 circuit boards. The software invents and writes a new line of text, using rules and a lexicon written by the artist, and displays it on the sign when triggered by a motion detector.
Niklas Roy his workshop is located in an old storefront with a big window facing towards the street. In an attempt to create more privacy inside, he decided to install a small but smart curtain in that window. The curtain is smaller than the window, but an additional surveillance camera and an old laptop provide it with intelligence: The computer sees the pedestrians and locates them. With a motor attached, it positions the curtain exactly where the pedestrians are.
Troika’s public artwork Shoal combines sculpture with architecture and technology. Spanning across a 50 meter long corridor, 467 fish-like objects wrapped in iridescent colours and suspended from the ceiling rotate rhythmically around their own axis to display the movements and interdependency typical to school of fish.
The ceiling architecture is set in motion and appears liquified changing the spatial experience of the corridor while opening up the surrounding architecture infinitely towards Lake Ontario.
Shoal was curated by PAM (Karen Mills and Justin Ridgeway) and commissioned by TEDCO as a permanent installation for the Corus building located at Toronto’s Waterfront, Queens Quay East.
It was a camera that didn’t use any film to capture still images – a camera that would capture images using a CCD imager and digitize the captured scene and store the digital info on a standard cassette. It took 23 seconds to record the digitized image to the cassette. The image was viewed by removing the cassette from the camera and placing it in a custom playback device. This playback device incorporated a cassette reader and a specially built frame store. This custom frame store received the data from the tape, interpolated the 100 captured lines to 400 lines, and generated a standard NTSC video signal, which was then sent to a television set.
Ikea Robotics was Adam Lassy his thesis project at ITP, Tisch School of the Arts in New York. He modified Ikea furniture to create mobile, wireless robots which can sense the spatial needs of it’s owner. The first video demos this behaviour. The second I find even more interesting, here he programmed the furniture to display some animal characteristics.