Sketch-a-Move is a project by Anab Jain and Louise Klinker. They actually did this a few years ago. It’s a concept for a toy car that allows you to explore the unique relationships between small surface doodles and actual physical movements. If you draw a circle on the top of the toy car, it will move in a circle. If you draw a complicated spiral, the car will move in a spiral. They don’t explain how it actually works or could work, but it sure looks like fun.
Flyfire is project initiated by the SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory), both departments of the MIT. The goal is to transform any ordinary space into a highly immersive and interactive display environment. Its first implemetation is a display system using a large number of self-organizing micro helicopters. Each of them acts as smart pixel by using LED’s. Their position in 3D space and their color can be defined in real time, together they’re canvas able to display any kind of 2D imagery.
“X by Y” is Daniel Rozin his current exhibition at the Bitforms Gallery in New York, but it’s also the title of one of his interactive installations. “X by Y” is a little different than his other mechanical mirrors, this time he arranged forty-four wooden slats horizontally and vertically. Of course they are controlled by motors and react on camera input. The result is an interactive pattern / grid display.
A second new piece that he presents is “Rust Mirror”. It’s made of 768 oxidized steel tiles and works like most of his mechanical mirrors.
The third one is a piece from 2008: “Mirrors Mirror”. I know that I’ve posted it before but it is still great.
Very Slow Scan Television (VSSTV) by Gebhard Sengmüller is a new television format that we have developed building upon Slow Scan Television (SSTV), an image transmission system used by Ham Radio amateurs. VSSTV uses broadcasts from this historic public domain television system and regular bubble wrap to construct an analogous system: Just as a Cathode Ray Tube mixes the three primary colors to create various hues, VSSTV utilizes a plotter-like machine to fill the individual bubbles with one of the three primary CRT colors, turning them into pixels on the VSSTV “screen”. Large television images with a frame rate of one per day are the result, images that take the idea of slow scan to the extreme.
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 Rothsuggested …
Here you can find some more details about the Robotagger.
Mobile Mobile is a Christmas installation at the Lost Boys international office in London. They used 50 old company cellphones to make this huge mobile. Each phone is controlled by a computer and has its own tone. When no one interacts with the sculpture, it plays “Carol of the Bells”. But you can also play with it. You can control it through this website or you can send a tweet with #lbitree and it will react to it. If you’re in London, you can just pop by at their office.
You might also like AKQA last years microwave oven piece.
Wilderness by Doug Aitken is a kinetic installation, made of stainless steel mirrors which are computer controlled by 35 variable speed motors. I would love to see a video of it. Anyone has a link?
Decode: Digital Design Sensations is an upcoming exhibition at Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The exhibition will show the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small screen based graphics to large-scale installations. The exhibition will explore three themes: Code as a Raw Material, Interactivity and The Network. You will be able to see work by Daniel Brown, Golan Levin, Daniel Rozin, Simon Heijdens, Trioka, Robert Hodgin, … I guess it’s quite clear that I’ll have to go to London between 8 December 2009 and 11 April 2010. But till then I’ll keep myself busy with the opensource digital identity of the exhibition created by Karsten Schmidt. You can download it here and start playing with it. If you submit your version of the identity, it’s possible that it will appear on the digital screens of the London Underground.
Tonight I saw a very nice presentation on the work of rAndom international, a London-based art and design collective, hosted by designtransfer of the UDK Berlin. One of the project that Hannes Koch presented was “Study For A Mirror” which is actually the next generation of their other piece called “A Study Of Three Mirrors“.
‘Study For A Mirror’ is a ‘temporary light painting’. Face recognition technology detects when the viewer is standing in front of the work and then directly paints the onlookers image in light. The Image then gradually fades. Evectively a mirror this work offers the ultimate immediate, yet ephemeral, contemporary portrait.
