Friday, July 08. 2011
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by Alex Bec
The word beautiful gets thrown around a lot when talking about creative projects, but I’m not sure many are as worthy of the tag as Oscar Lermitte’s Urban Stargazing. Frustrated with not being able to see constellations in the overly light-polluted sky of our beloved capital city, Oscar took the law into his own hands and not only invented his own, but also made them a physical reality with some nifty use of ultra-thin nylon line and fibre optics. Crane your neck and say “ohhhhhh.”
Monday, May 16. 2011
Via TreeHugger
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Photo by AndysPictures
Michigan's nightlife is looking up. The state's first International Dark Sky Park has been created. It's now one of only six in the U.S. and 10 in the world. Think about that.
In lots of (too many?) places on Earth, you don't see the full night sky of stars and galaxies. You see bits and pieces that aren't drowned out by light pollution from city streetlights and buildings (many buildings that don't need to be lit up from top to bottom during the night).
Michigan's new Dark Sky Park is a 600-acre stretch of old-growth timber located north of Petoskey, in Emmet County, along Lake Michigan and west of Mackinaw City.
The county-owned property, called the Headlands, was recently designated as a Dark Sky Park by the Arizona-based International Dark-Sky Association after experts measured the amount of light in the area, and found that it offered a clear, unaltered view of the night sky, as explained by MyNorth.com.
According to the association, some outdoor lighting retrofits are still needed before the Headlands is granted full status as a Dark Sky Park. The county also has passed an ordinance to curtail the growth of artificial light at night in surrounding areas, with the land in and around the park zoned for natural conditions and stringent lumen limits.
Mary Adams, of Harbor Springs, Michigan, an association member, was part of a group of locals that successfully pushed for the Dark Sky designation.
"The designation gives us a place to stand so we can raise awareness of the importance of having a dark night," Adams says. "It's good for the health and well-being of human beings and of nature. It gives us an opportunity to pause and think that we don't only need to be concerned about the quality of our water and our air, but also another resource that belongs to all of us - the night sky."
For more on the disappearance of darkness, see this clip from "The City Dark," highlighted on the International Dark-Sky Association website.
This new designation will hopefully be a boon to Emmet County --- one that doesn't require ripping out trees, constructing new buildings, and lighting them up at night. Several events are planned, including nighttime storytelling, star parties and astrophotography nights. No flashes, please.
More on Dark Sky Tourism
Dark Sky Tourism on Rise as More People Seek Out The Stars
What's On Your Must-See List? The Northern Lights Top Recent Poll
The Island of Sark is the Best Place to See the Stars
Friday, April 08. 2011
Via Creative Applications
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Particles is the latest installation by Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi currently on exhibit at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]. The installation centers around a spiral-shaped rail construction on which a number of balls with built-in LEDs and xbee transmitters are rolling while blinking in different time intervals, resulting in spatial drawings of light particles.
This is an art installation which is able to create a visionary beautiful dots pattern of blinking innumerable illuminations floating in all directions on the air. The number of balls with a built-in LED, pass through one after another on the rail “8-spiral shape.” We see this phenomenon like “the light particle float around” because the balls radiate in various timing.
The openFrameworks application controls both the release of “particles” as well as their glow based on the information read within the application. The image below shows perlin noise being translated into particles, giving each one glow and position properties.
The position of each ball is determined via total of 17 control points on the rail. Every time a ball passes through one of them, the respective ball’ s positional information is transmitted via a built-in infrared sensor. During the time the ball travels between one control points to the next, this position is calculated based on its average speed. The data for regulating the balls’ luminescence are divided by the control point segments and are switched every time a ball passes on a control point.
The audiences can select a shape from several patterns floating in aerial space using an interface of the display. The activation of the virtual balls on the screen are determined by the timing which a ball moving on the rail passes through a certain check point on the rail and the speed which is calculated by using average speed values. The sound is generated from the ball positions and the information of LED flash pattern and is played through 8ch speakers. The board inside the ball is an Arduino compatible board based on the original design from Arduino
Exhibition page: particles.ycam.jp/en/
Date & Time:March 5 (sat)−May 5 (thu) , 2011 10:00−19:00
Venue: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] Studio B
Admission free
Images courtesy of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] Photos: Ryuichi Maruo (YCAM)
Monday, January 31. 2011
Via Luminapolis
Scientists have been studying the biological impacts of light perceived by the human eye since as long ago as the 1980s. But it was not until 2002 that they discovered ganglion cells in the retina of mammals that are not used for “seeing”. The newly identified cells respond most sensitively to visible blue light and set the “master clock” that synchronises the system of internal clocks with the external cycle of day and night. This booklet provides a practical and user-oriented summary of what science knows today about the non-visual impact of light on human beings. It is not a final, authoritative work but an ambitious attempt to describe the nascent, fast-growing field of research examining light, health and efficiency. More>
Monday, December 20. 2010
Personal comment:
Can also be used for windows of course, as the oled can be transparent when not lit and semi-transparent when lit.
Friday, November 19. 2010
Via GOOD
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by Andrew Price
The architect Dan Maginn, who wrote GOOD's Square Feat miniseries, has been working on a plan to turn a stretch of 20th street in downtown Kansas City into a "more sustainable, walkable, bikeable, connectable street."
To help invest the community in the idea, Maginn wanted "to demonstrate how both planned and unplanned events happen on dynamic streets." To that end, he enlisted the help of a Scottish artist group called Sans Façon to help produce an event called Limelight.
Sans Façon convinced the city to shut off the street lights along one side of 20th street and replaced them with two high-intensity theatrical spotlights, focused on a small section of the sidewalk. As Maginn explained, these lights "bring out some latent performance-need in people."
Over the course of the night, Kansas Citians interacted with this impromptu public stage in a variety of ways. Some avoided it; some embraced it. Some came with planned performances; some just improvised.
See more images at the blog for Maginn's studio, El Dorado.
Personal comment:
I like the fact that in this project, a sustainable approach is not only a basic one that is about keeping everything the same, but less strong (i.e. keeping all the street lights on, but with led lights), or address only functional patterns. Sustainability should rather be about changing things, modifying habits...
We can decide to shut down all the street lights in one part of the city (like here), but keep two very strong spots that partly light the street, and then also open up for new type of behaviors. We can shut down some energy uses on one side and open new ones on the other if the overall balance is still a benefit.
Sustainability should be about new ways of doing things, new behaviors, new environments, ...
Monday, November 15. 2010
Via BLDGBLOG
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by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
[Image: Gold nanoparticles, courtesy of Georgia Tech].
It was reported earlier this month that " gold nanoparticles can induce luminescence in leaves." That's right: glowing trees. The scientists who discovered it call it bio-LED.
According to ElectroIQ, "by implanting the gold nanoparticles into Bacopa caroliniana plants, Dr. Yen-Hsun Su [of the Research Center for Applied Science in Taiwan] was able to induce the chlorophyll in the leaves to produce a red emission. Under high wavelength of ultraviolet, the gold nanoparticles can produce a blue-violet fluorescence to trigger a red emission of the surrounding chlorophyll."
This has the exquisitely surreal effect of being able "to make roadside trees luminescent at night"—with the important caveat "that the technologies and bioluminescence efficiency need to be improved for the trees to replace street lights in the future." In other words, we're not quite there—but a deciduous splendor might illuminate streets near you, soon.
[Image: Gold nanoparticles, courtesy of Georgia Tech].
Last spring, I should point out, I had the pleasure of teaching a research seminar at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, looking at blackouts: that is, landscapes—both urban and otherwise—encountered in a state of unexpected darkness.
We looked at a huge variety of technologies for non-electrical illumination—sources of light for situations in which electricity has failed—from tools as basic as pocket lighters to openly whimsical investigations into bioluminescent fish, plants, algae, and bacteria, scaled up to intimations of an entire bioluminescent metropolis.
But the idea that trees impregnated with gold might someday line city streets, turning night into day, is like a vision of Gustav Klimt unexpectedly crossed with Con Edison: a botanical alchemy through which base wood becomes light at the speed of photosynthesis.
Wednesday, November 10. 2010
By fabric | ch
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One month and a half ago, we were presenting a new work during the 2010 01SJ Biennial in South Hall, San Jose -- an amazingly big air conditioned (and sort of inflated) hall in the downtown area -- (in San Jose, San Francisco Bay Area, CA), under the exhibition main title "Build Your Own World".
This artificial interior landscape cut from natural light was the ideal place to set up I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, a new work from fabric | ch that uses I-Weather, the open source artificial climate based on human metabolism, circadian rythms and on medical knowledge about light therapy and chronotherapy.
The main purpose of the installation, as mentioned earlier on this blog, was to "propose a critical use of I-Weather as a model for a metabolic public lighting source, distributed and synchronized through an imaginary Deep Space Internet into the confined and conditioned environments of space exploration vehicles or into speculative public spaces of “distant colonies”".
What could a public space offer in 2010? How could public lighting --an old technology... that still defines most part of the public space at night-- evolve? What is the nature of space in Outer Space, is it public, private? If it is a public space -- by now, space exploration has been mostly supported by public fundings... --, could we light it up with a public and open source artificial climate, distributed through a new type of Internet? These were some of the ideas we tried to adress through this piece.
And here are (finally!) some follow-up pictures of the installation.
Yellow-Orange time ("night"):
According to the lighting and color rules of I-Weather, yellow-orange light (above) doesn't affect your body clock, it is therefore similar to a night situation, but where you can still undertake calm activities. At some periods (just below), I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting presented the full color spectrum of I-Weather, a gradient that vary from blue to orange (day to night) and that could also therefore be read as a "time rainbow". Below, in blue, is the day time (blue light blocks the secretion of melatonin into the body).
Gradient time ("time rainbow", all times at the same time):
Blue time (day):
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I-Weather has been produced with the support of Swissnex San Francisco and Pro Helvetia.
Monday, November 08. 2010
Via MIT Technology Review
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A flexible metamaterial that manipulates visible light could lead to better camouflage.
By Stephen Cass
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Now you see it: A sheet of Metaflex, a new metamaterial that could be used in devices and fabrics that can manipulate visible light.
Credit: University of St. Andrews |
Researchers at the University of St. Andrews have created sheets of a flexible metamaterial that can manipulate visible light. "It's a pretty significant step forward," says Stephen Cummer, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University and the inventor of the first metamaterial-based invisibility cloak. "At radio frequencies we know how to make a lot of these things. But at optical wavelengths, things have been very fabrication-limited."
Metamaterials allow researchers to manipulate electromagnetic waves beyond the boundaries of what physics allows in natural materials. As well as promising better solar cells and high-resolution microscope lenses, metamaterials have also been used to create so-called invisibility cloaks, in which electromagnetic waves are bent around an object as if it simply weren't there.
However, metamaterials must be constructed out of elements smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation being manipulated. This means that invisibility cloaks (and most metamaterial devices in general) only work with wavelengths longer than those found in visible light, such as radio and microwave frequencies. Metamaterials designed to work with optical wavelengths are built on rigid and fragile substrates, and as a result they've been confined to the lab.
The new metamaterial, dubbed "Metaflex" by its creators, is manufactured on top of a rigid substrate. An initial, sacrificial layer of the material is deposited on this substrate to stop the subsequent layers from sticking to this substrate. A sheet of a flexible, transparent, plastic polymer is then laid down. Next, a lithographic process, similar to that used to make silicon chips, creates a lattice of gold bars, each 100 to 200 nanometers long and 40 nanometers thick, on top of the polymer. (These bars act as "nanoantennas" that interact with incoming electromagnetic waves.) The Metaflex material is then bathed in a chemical that releases the polymer from the layer below and from the rigid substrate.
By varying the length and spacing of the nanoantennas, Metaflex can be tuned to interact with different wavelengths of light. The simple sheets tested by the researchers simply blocked a portion of an incoming beam of light at specific wavelengths, but this is enough to demonstrate that Metaflex is a working metamaterial. The St. Andrew's researchers tested wavelengths as short as 620 nanometers (corresponding to a red color).
So far, the researchers have produced flexible sheets as large as five by eight millimeters and as thin as four micrometers. While a fingernail-sized sample may seem small, it's a big step up from the microscopic dimensions of other optical metamaterials. The St. Andrew's scientists are confident that Metaflex can be produced in even larger sizes and at high volumes. "It's absolutely scalable to industrial levels," says Andrea Di Falco, the lead author of a paper published in the New Journal of Physics yesterday that describes the material.
Even at small sizes, the flexibility of the material is likely to confer some big advantages. "You really would like to be able to shape optical metamaterials into cylinders or spherical sections." This could allow, for example, the creation of curved superlenses that could magnify objects so small that they currently can't be seen with optical lenses due to diffraction effects. "On rigid substrates, it's just next to impossible to fabricate that kind of thing," says Duke University's Cummer, but with a flexible material, "you could fabricate flat and easily bend it into shape."
Di Falco believes it should be possible to stack sheets of Metaflex together to create thick layers and blocks of the material, creating the first optical metamaterial with a significant three-dimensional bulk. Such a development would open the door to new properties, including, perhaps, the ability to work with more than a single wavelength at a time. Other researchers have been able to create metamaterials that can be tuned to respond to different single wavelengths after fabrication, but ideally, they'd like a material that can work across a wide band of wavelengths simultaneously. This might be achieved through stacking sheets of MetaFlex, each tuned to a different wavelength.
The researchers' next step is to create these stacks and study how the properties of Metaflex change when sheets are twisted, stretched, or bent.
Ultimately, Di Falco says, Metaflex could have applications such as manipulating light from an LED built into a contact lens for augmented reality, so that computer-generated images are projected onto the wearer's retina. And of course, there's invisibility. "If you have something flexible, you could embed it into a fabric. Then you could think of tuning the properties of each individual layer to change the response of the fabric, giving something similar to camouflage. So, yes—there's some grounds for [an invisibility cloak]. Not tomorrow. But that's what I'll be working on," says Di Falco.
Copyright Technology Review 2010.
Friday, November 05. 2010
Via Pruned
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by Alexander Trevi
( Deep Space Public Lighting by fabric | ch. Image courtesy of the artists.)
For the past few months, I-Weather.org, developed by Philippe Rahm and fabric | ch, has been churning up a pastel maelstrom here on this blog for use by our spatially and temporally displaced readers to restore their circadian rhythms, whether this is actually possible or not. You, too, can embed this artificial sun on your website to blast your asynchronous readers into metabolic normality. Its open source code is freely available.
At the recent 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, California, we saw a less earthbound and less private platform for this quasi-light therapy: a flickering light tower for “confined and conditioned environments of space exploration vehicles” and “speculative public spaces of distant colonies.”
To distribute and synchronize these pockets of simulant terrestrial cycles of day and night across vast distances, fabrica | ch proposes using a theoretical Deep Space Internet.
( Deep Space Public Lighting by fabric | ch. Image courtesy of the artists.)
( Deep Space Public Lighting by fabric | ch. Image courtesy of the artists.)
By happy coincide, we first learned about this project just as the first reports about the trapped miners in Chile started trickling in to our attention, specifically, the news that NASA scientists have been flown in by the Chilean government to offer advice on how to help the men stay physically and mentally healthy during the weeks-long rescue.
(Graphics and research by C. Argandoña, I. Muñoz, C. Araya, J.Cortés/LA TERCERA, via The Washington Post. Source)
Al Holland, a NASA psychologist, says during a press conference:
One of the things that's being recommended is that there be one place, a community area, which is always lighted. And then you have a second area which is always dark for sleep, and then you have a third area which is work, doing the mining, and the shifts can migrate through these geographic locations within the mine and, in that way, regulate the daylight cycle of the shift.
It occurred to us that one should make a portable version of Deep Space Public Lighting for future mining disasters. It should be able to fit through bore holes and then easily assembled by survivors in the murky depths of a collapsed tunnel.
A deployable piazza for subterranean “distant colonies.“
(Trapped miners at the Copiapó mine on video. Image via Reuters/Chilean Government. Source.)
Rather than being illuminated by the anemic brightness of a hard hat or video camera, one bathes in soothing electromagnetic wavelengths from a technicolor torch.
Or from an i-weatherized iPhone.
(There's an app for that.)
And yes, considering the high demand for coal and industrial minerals, there will be many more mining disasters, many more trapped miners and, depending on various fortunate circumstances, more tunnels to be reconfigured. In fact, only a few days after the last Chilean miner was brought to the surface, 11 miners were trapped at a coal mine in China after a deadly explosion.
Consider, too, the recent export ban by China on shipment of rare earth elements to Japan after a kerfuffle between the two countries involving a collision between a Chinese fishing trawler and Japanese Coast Guard patrol boats near some disputed islands. The ban may have been brief, and China may have denied having instituted one in the first place, nevertheless, the incident points again that China is willing to use its near resource monopoly of rare earth metals as a political tool, to get its way, in other words. Other countries have again taken notice, and are scrambling to develop alternative sources, if not already, to ensure future supply. With new mines opening and even old mine operations being restarted, there are more potentials for disasters.
Reformatted in this context, Deep (Inner) Space Public Lighting engages not just with issues such as “public space, public data, public technology and artificial climate” but also with the geopolitics of natural resources, globalization and our collective networked boredom that seemingly can only be satiated by an epic spectacle natural and man-made disasters and the ensuing heroic rescue of survivors.
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