Monday, June 27. 2011
Via Creative Applications
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By Filip
Amongst the wonderful collection of work currently on show at the Royal College of Art, in the corner on the first floor sits an installation/object by Markus Kayser called Solar Sinter. An MA Design Products student project, Solar Sinter is probably one of the most inspiring projects this year, aiming to raise questions about the future of manufacturing and triggers dreams of the full utilisation of the production potential of the world’s most efficient energy resource - the sun.
In a world increasingly concerned with questions of energy production and raw material shortages, this project explores the potential of desert manufacturing, where energy and material occur in abundance. In this experiment sunlight and sand are used as raw energy and material to produce glass objects using a 3D printing process, that combines natural energy and material with high-tech production technology.
In August 2010 Markus Kayser took his first solar machine – the Sun-Cutter (see video below) – to the Egyptian desert in a suitcase. This was a solar-powered, semi-automated low-tech laser cutter, that used the power of the sun to drive it and directly harnessed its rays through a glass ball lens to ‘laser’ cut 2D components using a cam-guided system. In the deserts of the world two elements dominate – sun and sand. The sun offers the energy and sand an unlimited supply of silica in the form of quartz. When silicia sand is heated to melting point, once cooled solidifies as glass. This process of converting a powdery substance via a heating process into a solid form is known as sintering and has in recent years become a central process in design prototyping known as 3D printing or SLS (selective laser sintering). By using the sun’s rays instead of a laser and sand instead of resins used in modern 3D printers, Markus had the basis of an entirely new solar-powered machine and production process for making glass objects that taps into the abundant supplies of sun and sand to be found in the deserts of the world.
The Solar-Sinter was completed in mid-May and later that month Markus took this experimental machine to the Sahara desert near Siwa, Egypt, for a two week testing period. The machine and the results shown here represent the initial significant steps towards what Markus envisages as a new solar-powered production tool of great potential.
The Solar-Sinster uses ReplicatorG software, an open source 3D printing program. For more information, see replicat.org.
The project is currently on show at the Royal College of Art graduate exhibition and I agree “a ‘must-see’ event for anyone interested in twenty-first century art and design”.
24 June to 3 July 2011.
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU
Project Page
(Thanks to Steffen for pointing it out)
Related:
Known Unknowns [Processing, Objects] by @comkee + @ranzen at …
Dromolux [Processing, Objects] – Increasing cognitive performance …
Tuesday, March 29. 2011
Via MIT Technology (Blogs)
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Bill Atkinson invented everything from the menu bar to hypercard--the program that inspired the first wiki.
The wiki is a funny thing: unlike the blog, which is a bastard child of the human need to record life's events and the exhibitionistic tendencies the Internet encourages, there is nothing all that obvious about it.
Ward Cunningham, the programmer who invented the modern wiki, has said that this is precisely what made it so compelling -- it was one of those too-obvious ideas that doesn't really make sense until you've seen it in action. To judge by the level of discourse in the average well-trafficked comment thread, to put a page on the internet and to invite all to edit it is a recipe for defacement and worse. Yet it works -- in part due to its occasionally ant-democratic nature.
Unlike the first weblogs, which were personal diaries, the very first wiki -- it still exists -- is devoted to software development. But where did its creator get the idea to create a wiki (then called a WikiWiki) in the first place?
Hypercard.
It's a name that will mean a great deal to anyone who can identify this creature:
Hypercard was the world wide web before the web even existed. Only it wasn't available across a network, and instead of hypertext, it was merely hypermedia -- in other words, different parts of the individual 'cards' one could create with it were linkable to other cards.
The most famous application ever to be built with Hypercard is the original version of the computer game Myst. (Which, like seemingly every other bit of puzzle, arcade and adventure game nostalgia, has been reconstituted on the iPhone.)
Hypercard made it easy to build "stacks" of graphically rich (for the time, anyway) "cards" that could be interlinked. Cunningham built a stack in Hypercard that documented computer programmers and their ideas, and, later, programming patterns. The web allowed him to realize an analogous "stack" in a public space; the last step was to allow anyone to add to it.
Bill Atkinson, the Apple programmer who invented Hypercard, also invented MacPaint, the QuickDraw toolbox that the original Macintosh used for graphics, and the Menu bar. He is literally one of those foundational programmers whose ideas -- or at least their expression -- have influenced millions, and have descendants on practically every computer in existence.
Which means Atkinson gave birth to a system elegant enough to presage the world wide web, inspire the first Wiki (without which Wikipedia, begun in 2001, would have been impossible) and give rise to the most haunting computer game of a generation. Both Atkinson and Cunningham are links in a long chain of inspiration and evolution stretching back to the earliest notions of hypertext.
And that's how Apple -- or specifically Bill Atkinson -- helped give birth to the wiki. Which is 16 years old today!
Tuesday, December 07. 2010
Via Vague Terrain
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In creating a foundational piece of software infrastructure Ben Fry and Casey Reas have done myself and countless peers a great service and helped launch thousands of arty new-media applets. In Form+Code (F+C) Reas teams up with Chandler McWilliams and LUST design studio to produce a slim introductory text on procedural and code-influenced art and design. While the book makes only the briefest mention of Processing, a good percentage of the work documented in it can be traced directly or indirectly to the platform that emerged from the MIT Aesthetics and Computation work group. F+C also includes historical precedents, from loving documentation of green Cathode Ray Tube Spacewar!, to one of Sol LeWitt's wall drawing instruction cards (presented here as code only — LeWitt's typed out gallery proposal). There are a few other nods to post-minimalism and other pre-P5 projects. Additionally, F+C also breaks out of the screen-based ghetto, including images from proposed and built architectural investigations, art installations, design prototypes and sculptures.
The book itself is broken down into conceptual chapters that explore techniques that are code-like or only practically achievable with code-based tools: repetition, geometric transformation, parametrization, visualization, simulation. Each chapter includes spare descriptive pages which introduce overall themes and very briefly discuss the documented projects. F+C is a fairly no-nonesense machine -- it moves briskly through its functional structure of chapters, never pausing to dwell on any one project or image. Yoshi Sodeoka's 2004 video work based on presidential State of the Union addresses is presented in much the same way that Marius Watz's beautiful software generated abstractions are. Both sit alongside a Rafael Lozano-Hemmer installation, an elegant Cory Arcangle data-vis deconstruction, images of a Morphosis tower project for Paris, news-stream visualizations, and Mark Lombardi inspired diagramming. To some extent all these projects (and many others) are being stripped mined for the illustration of a technique or concept. This undifferentiated treatment of a really diverse set of work and ideas is, for me, the primary weakness of the book.
Even with some notable omissions in the projects covered, there's likely to be a items here most of us haven't seen yet – I discovered many. If you are looking for an overview and introduction, or a catalog of interesting work, Form+Code will be a useful resource. Ultimately, though, it leaves me hungry for a more focused and critical approach to this incredibly interesting subject. It's clear that Reas, McWilliams and LUST would be particularly well qualified to produce exactly that sort of text.
Personal comment:
The more and more code based / behavioral design, documented and commented here in this new book by Casey Reas et al.
Friday, December 03. 2010
Via BLDGBLOG
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by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
[Image: From "Kielder Probes" by Bob Sheil].
Beginning in 2003, architect Bob Sheil began experimenting with a group of "micro-environmental surveying probes" that he was later to install in Kielder Park, Northumbria, UK.
[Image: From "Kielder Probes" by Bob Sheil].
The probes were "designed to act as dual monitors and responsive artefacts." What does that mean? Sheil explains:
The probes were designed to measure difference over time rather than the static characteristics of any given instance. Powered by solar energy, the probes gathered and recorded ‘micro environmental data’ over time. The probes were simultaneously and physically responsive to these changes, opening out when warm and sunny, closing down when cold and dark. Thus not only did the probes record environmental change, but they demonstrated how these changes might induce a responsive behaviour specific to a single location.
After the probes were installed, they were filmed by "an array of high-resolution digital cameras programmed to record at regular intervals."
[Images: From "Kielder Probes" by Bob Sheil].
The resulting data—which took note of the climatic and solar situations in which the objects began to change—offers insights, Sheil suggests, into how "passively activated responsive architecture" might operate in other sites, under other environmental conditions.
[Images: From "Kielder Probes" by Bob Sheil].
As DIY landscape-registration devices constructed from what appear to be off-the-shelf aluminum plates, they also cut an interesting formal profile above the horizon line, like rare birds or machine-flowers perched amidst the tree stumps.
[Image: From "Kielder Probes" by Bob Sheil].
Friday, November 26. 2010
Via Creative Review
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by Eliza Williams
In a promotion for French telecommunications company Bouygues Télécom, DDB Paris recently devised a way to take your Facebook profile offline...
The agency realised that while people may share their most treasured memories and photographs via Facebook, the constantly changing nature of the site means that they can quickly be forgotten, or lost amongst the amount of info stored in a profile. So Bouygues Télécom created the option of turning your Facebook profile into an actual book.
Participants could pick up to ten friends to include in their book, and also pick the timeframe covered, whether it be a birthday, wedding or other significant event. As these images of Francis Peric's book show, the styling of the books were also thoroughly in keeping with Facebook's look. The application was a huge success, with the limited edition run of 1,000 books all requested within one hour.
Credits:
Agency: DDB Paris
Exec creative director: Alexandre Hervé
Creatives: Siavosh Zabeti, Alexander Kalchev
Monday, November 15. 2010
Via Pasta & Vinegar
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by Nicolas Nova
Recently ran across this curious magazine called “Creative Computing“, one of the earliest covering the microcomputer revolution (published from 1974 until December 1985). Readers interested in this can have a look at the some articles.
With titles such as “Is breaking into a time-sharing system a crime?”, “Why Supermarkets Are Going Bananas Over Computers”, “Videodiscs - The Ultimate Computer Input Device?” or “How Much Privacy Should You Have?”, the magazine is definitely an intriguing read today. The topic addressed there ranged from artificial (and “extra-terrestrial”) intelligence, computers in education, languages and programming theories, BASIC scripts, upcoming technologies, games and fictions (with “art and poetry”).
For people interested in current “trends” such as DYI or privacy, there is plenty to explore in order to understand some underlying roots. See for instance “amateur computing” or How One Computer Manufacturer Looks at the Data Privacy/Security Issue
Why do I blog this? sunday afternoon hops on the internets always lead to curious material. Possibly useful to show students some examples of computer culture history.
Personal comment:
While we mention this old mag, don't forget to visit also Radical Software, which is A must see for media art / computer art history from the late 60ies - early 70ies (with papers by or about Buckminster Füller, about Norbert Wiener and Cybernetics, about Mc Luhan --of course...--, from Nam June Paik and other video art pioneers, with drawings by Ant Farm, statements about "media ecologies", etc.). And of course, don't forget the Whole Earth Catalog from the same period.
Saturday, August 21. 2010
Via Domus, via Beatrice Galilee
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By Christophe Guignard
Arctic opening is an new installation for the Festival MIMI which is part of an outdoor exhibition presenting several works of art / experimental architecture. The aim of Arctic Opening is to let appear a "second day" made of a large artificial lighting, between Marseille's sunsets and sunrises, when the islands becomes dark and quiet. The light emitted by the installation will reproduce the luminous variations of a distant environment, where the sun shines 24 hours long during summer: the Arctic. This light, transported from North, will shine on a Mediterranean landscape, facing the Frioul port. Set up in a rocky zone swept by wind, close to an industrial ruin, Arctic Opening could also evoke a strange scientific expedition. Its sensing devices and climatic interfaces would analyze by anticipation a fictional and catastrophic future of an Arctic Ocean free of ice. BG
"Each day, when night falls on our urbanized landscapes in our cities, our streets or our ports, another day dawns, electric. It is literally a "second day" which begins: one of neon signs, street lights, sodium, mercury or fluorescent lighting, one of illuminated apartments and shops windows, one of night activities that we did not know two centuries ago.
Although today we no longer think much about it, this "second day" is now part of everyday life for city dwellers. Artificial light has been a conquest: by fire first, then by the gas, and more recently by electricity. This "fabricated" light permitted first to extend artificially the day at night to illuminate the darkness, but also to transform our relationship to time, to landscape and to space. It especially allowed to exceed the given natural immemorial cycle of day and night induced by the rotation of the Earth itself, and thus to redefine architectural and urban spaces.
One also began to design new architectures that did not require natural lighting anymore. In a few decades, artificial lighting profoundly altered the lifestyle of city dwellers, but not only: birds began to sing at night near the lampposts, insects to swarm under the spotlights and stars to disappear of the urban night sky, opening the door to a strange world, that combines natural and artificial cycles. Losses and gains then.
This environment, sometimes magical, sometimes disturbing, develops undoubtedly for us a poetry of shifts. Now, the challenge is to deploy these shifts, which combine presents and futures, into a comprehensive reflection on our contemporary space and our consumption of energy.
Designed for the Innovative Music Festival (MIMI 2010) in Marseille, on the Frioul islands, Arctic Opening does not aim to deny this "second day", but to amplify its positive and sensitive issues. Thus, Arctic Opening seeks to develop the potential of imagination(s) of artificial illumination, while integrating new technologies and intelligent lighting cycles of low energy consumption.
In a global environment, endlessly interconnected, which develops new forms of mobility, temporalities, and social behaviours at the crossings of time zones, this artificial day provides an opportunity for another kind of "days", simultaneous and distant: an imaginary or mediated "connection" with countries where precisely and literally, at the same time, the sun is shining. Through satellite imagery and sensor data, it is now possible to imagine opening a "window" onto a sensitive and remote light whose intensity varies continuously, the sky is sunny, then cloudy, then possibly sunny again. A window "teleporting" abstractly a remote atmosphere without physical mobility, without means of transport other than transportation data from there to here.
With Arctic Opening, fabric | ch proposes to create such an "opening" at a large scale, to another day: an artificial and sensitive light, revealing some geographical patterns, luminous and meteorological, across the globe (to the summer of one hemisphere corresponds the winter of the other, to the daylight the darkness, to the perpetual light of a pole the night of the other, etc.). When night falls over Marseille this "second day" gets up with its source somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, on the edge of the habitable zones, where once the ice melted new navigation routes open and will open more and more in the future.
Fed by light coming from regions, where in this season, the horizontal light of the sun never sets, where sunrise and sunset mix, Arctic Opening reproduces the continuous modulation of the northern summer. Composed of hundreds of light emitting diodes (LEDs), this bright band long of eighteen meters illuminates a rocky landscape, swept by winds. At sunrise, it goes slowly to reveal a temporary installation of pipes, placed there to conduct this experiment in distant light. Erected near the vicinity of a military and industrial relic of the twentieth century, a tent hosting the instruments of control suggests a possible scientific expedition in an "hostile" zone.
The combination of light produced by this window and the Frioul islands' landscape produces a composite territory: Arctic Mediterranea, remote nocturnal day. This hybrid area in mixed light is purposely created as a prospective environment, which evokes the contemporary patterns of mobility and crossing time zones, the fluxes and the networks, the artificiality and the mediatization, or to indicate the strange topographic similarities between the arid Frioul islands and the Arctic regions where no tree grows.
As if this temporary place in front of Marseille, illuminated by a light transported from the Arctic could become the distant, catastrophic and fictitious future of these northern territories: warmed by climatic changes, visited by boats navigating on new routes opened by melting ice, the shores of the Far North could begin to resemble those of the Mediterranean Sea. This environment would then hybridize himself as well, as people become increasingly mobile over time: mix of here and elsewhere, future and present, material and immaterial.
Wednesday, August 18. 2010
Via Mashable
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by Jolie O'Dell
Here’s one for all you lovers of futuristic interfaces. An interactive hardware company called Displax has begun marketing Skin, a paper-thin, flexible film that would transform any non-metal surface into an interactive touchscreen.
You could place Skin on any surface, transparent or opaque, flat or curved, and use it to display any interactive content you like. Displax’s multi-touch technology can detect up to 16 fingers at once and can also detect air movement.
Skin is completely transparent and works on surfaces that are also transparent; you can place Skin on a glass surface and interact with content displayed under the glass.
This unique hardware operates via a grid of nanowires embedded Skin’s polymer film. Each time a user makes contact with the surface, either by blowing on it or directly touching it, “a small electrical disturbance is detected allowing the micro-processor controller to pinpoint the movement or direction of the air flow,” according to Displax.
We can imagine millions of cool use cases for such a technology — business presentations, medicine, museums, schools, and gaming to start. The possibilities are as endless as our collective and ever-growing want and need to interact with digital content through multi-touch interfaces.
What do you think of Skin? Is this a product you’d like to try or use?
More About: displax, Film, Hardware, interaction, interface, skin, touchscreen, trending
Friday, July 23. 2010
By fabric | ch
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As a follow up to our recent post about fabric | ch's installation (Arctic Opening / Fenêtre Arctique) on the Frioul Island in Marseilles, here are some pictures shot during the exhibition.
It has been a quite difficult project to achieve due to hard climatic conditions (40°C all day long during installation and exhibition... This was certainly hard for us, but even more for computers and electronic equipment...), but also due to the fact that the location, size of installation and lighting technology have changed one week prior to opening! ... Definitely not easy to manage...
We thought of this project as a sort of fictional expedition, but it ended up to be a real one! We worked during one week on site to set it up, test, code and modify it. The result was some sort of hypnotic leftover of this experience, running in standalone mode.
Interfaces and programs analyze the meteo as well as the lighting conditions north of the Artic Circle, where daytime is permanent at this time of the year (we were still close to the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere). These illumination conditions were then channeled (though a LED based large "window-display") to the Frioul Island to light up a piece of its deserted landscape. This distant light appears only at sunset in Marseilles and until sunrise.
Pictures: Frank Petitpierre, Nicolas Besson, Leticia Carmo, fabric | ch
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Project, conception and programmation: fabric | ch
Ligths: Lumens8
On site supervision: Etienne Fortin, AMI
MIMI Direction: Ferdinand Richard, AMI
Curatorship: Pierre-Emmanuel Reviron, Seconde Nature
With the support of Marseille-Provence 2013, MIMI Festival and Lumens8. Arctic Opening is a MIMI 2010 creation by fabric | ch.
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