Wednesday, July 07. 2010
Photo credit Pieter Kers, via Gizmodo In the middle of a city, finding a semblance of the wilderness is tough to do. Sitting yourself in a park is about the closest you can get. But DUS Architects have come up with a way for you to trick yourself into thinking you're in a forest with no beginning and no end, using strategically placed mirrors and a single tree. ... Read the full story on TreeHugger
Personal comment:
The (in)famous endless horizon mirror effect! (we used it too in some of our projects --RealRoom(s), Tower of Atmospheric Relations--, but vertically: endless vertical space). Here by DUS Architects, also known for their umbrella pavilion!
-----
by Jacob Gaboury
[3d image in 80 cm x 120 cm format.]
[Previzualisation. Sculpture created using a prototyping technique. Size: 15 cm in diameter.]
In logic and computer programming, a Boolean operator is a type of variable between two states. In computer-generated imagery, Boolean operations enable us to subtract, add or create an intersection between two objects.
In this series I subtract a sphere from a landscape. The latter becomes hollow. It is sterile, it lacks something, the breath of life. It is a morbid image: a Boolean nature.
A sculpture completes the image by representing the missing part.
The sum of the image and the sculpture forms the landscape in its entirety.
Via Pruned
-----
by Alexander Trevi
(How's your weather?)
When we set out to upgrade our Blogger Classic Template to Blogger Layouts (or is it Blogger Design?), we planned on streamlining the layout into just one column. But then we accidentally stumbled upon an embeddable personal artificial sun. We were instantly smitten, and knew we had to incorporate it into the new design, single column be damned.
Courtesy of Philippe Rahm and fabric | ch, this sun now flickering above is simply the background color mutating through a 25-hour cycle of bright hues, from warm oranges to fresh greens and cool blues, then back again. These retinal oscillations are an attempt at creating an artificial climate, one which satisfies “the metabolic and physiological requirements of a human being in an environment partially or completely removed from earthly influences: mediated reality, networks and netlag, the disruption of the body clock that comes with air travel, as well as with extra-terrestrial trips and holidays.”
Accessible everywhere and to everybody thanks to the Internet, this artificial climate called i-weather makes it possible to live in a situation completely removed from natural locations by producing an artificial circadian rhythm synchronised to match the inner cycle of the human hormonal and endocrine system. In the absence of the natural terrestrial cycle of day and night, it becomes apparent that this inner cycle in fact lasts around 25 hours, and that body temperature, the alternation between sleep and wakefulness, and the accumulation and secretion of substances such as cortisone and oligopeptides, all depend on it.
Stare for awhile at our twinkling blog or somebody else's and any temporal and spatial displacement you might have acquired from marathon coding or CADing sessions will hopefully be mitigated.
Of course, you could also hack a TV to blast your room with a pastel maelstrom. At airports all over the world, there could also be coin-operated Artificial Weather Climate Rooms for One in which the eternally jet lagged stabilize themselves with a refreshing technicolor shower. Should such enclosures be considered a security threat, perhaps an iPhone reconfigured as a portable weather machine might be enough to spatially and temporally normalize yourself.
In the Archives:
Tropicalia
Personal comment:
We very recently released a new version of I-Weather, a speculative proposition for an artificial climate based on light therapy principles, mainly. It will be used for an installation later this year in San Francisco - San Jose (the 01SJ biennal of curator Steve Dietz).
The climate is open source and free to use. More free applications and pieces of code should appear along the way.
But as I noticed today that Alexander Trevi from Pruned decided to use it on its blog, I take the opportunity to pinpoint it!
-----
by Andrew Price
The Planck space observatory has captured a "multi-frequency all-sky image of the microwave sky." There's more information, including a video that shows how the telescope rotated in space to create a 360-degree image, at the European Space Agency website. This is your home, and it's huge (though only a very small part of it is comfortable to be in).
Via Boing Boing
Personal comment:
Yes it's huge... hundreds of billions of galaxies which each coutain hundreds of billions of stars! For the visible part.
|