Daan Roosegaarde describes his work as fluctuating between sculpture and architecture. Last year he unveiled his 4d pixel project and it appeared widely over the blogosphere. Last week I got the opportunity to find out more about his work when he talked at Game Set Match. Out of all his work his liquid space projects which he continues to develop were of most interest to me since he shares my curiosity with physically transforming space.
Liquid Space is a space which physically reacts to the behavior of the visitor. Through the use of sensors, software and mechanisms, the space changes in form and sound. This way, a dynamic situation is created in which visitor and space become one.
Liquid 2.0 which is under development is an interactive living cocoon which physically adapts to sounds of the visitors. Daan is hoping it will be more adaptive, more sensual, and more dangerous.
Back in April 05, I posted an interface in progress by Brian Crabtree. Now 1 year on, they are going into production. Good job Monome, I know you’ve been hard at work. I also hear the software may become open source soon.
Rising up out of the desert near Niland California is Leonard Knight’s whimsical vision of paradise: waterfalls, flowers, streets of gold, fields of rich green grass and towering pines. It virtually blankets a small hill and still, he continues to build.
This world of his has an unquestionably surreal quality, not just because
it’s made out of adobe and paint, but also because almost everything is
constructed out of bible verses and Christian catch-phrases. “God is love” is painted everywhere. And though this sugary coating is interesting, I personally find the darker bits more intriguing. For example, his sculpted “love” looks like it might hurt if we were to touch it. And one tunnel seems to be filled with tremendous neurons (does Knight unknowingly feel trapped inside his own brain?).
Of course, there is no correct interpretation for his world. One thing’s for certain… almost everyone who meets him utterly enjoys him (and his free postcards). So if you’re ever in Niland, stop by and say hi. At the very least, take a look at some of the photos below (you owe it to Knight).
We’ve gone out to Salvation Mountain several times, each
time showing more friends and family what Leonard has done. That entire
southeast region of the Salton Sea has many interesting stops including
Slab City (snowbirds and squatters community on a deserted military
base), Bombay Beach (half underwater) and the numerous bird preserves
(one dedicated by Sonny Bono). Quite an interesting place. I recently snapped a bunch of photos while out there.
You should know about this pagoda in Myanmar for any number of amazing reasons. First, it sits on a big rock. Second, as you can plainly see, the rock itself is totally gilded in gold and looks like a shot out of a some spectacular nonexistent sci-fi film.
More importantly still, the great rock of the Kyaik-htiyo pagoda is balancing on the precipice of a larger rock. And when I say balancing, I mean really balancing; the area of contact between the two rocks is unbelievably small. So please don’t push…
However, barring any natural disasters, the pagoda probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The stone hasn’t moved for hundreds of years; perhaps the single hair of Lord Buddha, upon which the pagoda is erected, is somehow keeping this gargantuan rock from slipping away…?
More — lots and lots and lots more! — beautifully stained plant cells at Jim Haseloff’s Laboratory, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge.
Perhaps a collaboration between Jim Haseloff, Google Maps, and Pruned can be cooked up. Something about armchair biogeographers strolling by a petiole before nanoscaling through a mitochandria, making sure not get in the way of speeding mRNAs. Or spelunking down vascular tubings.
We’ve had a plethora of stunning bicycles grace the pixels here, but the Sandwich Bike might just be the most beautiful so far. If only for it’s intentions. Though its visage is none too shabby either. Designers Basten Leijh, Imre Verhoeven and Pieter Janssen wanted to do good, by designing creatively. As we understand it (and feel free to correct us, if we got confused), their idea is to craft a bike twice as cheap as standard models. This will allow the purchaser to basically buy two for the price of one. He/She keeps one, while another can be shipped to developing countries to provide much needed transport, such as enabling rural kids to cover long distances to school. Their vision being that a donation of mobility, unlike money, will not be subject to corruption. Like, no despot would want to steal bikes from an aid program, now would they? Well, maybe they got that reasoning wrong! For, according to ‘Core 77′, some evil-doer just stole the prototype from a recent trade show. And when you think about the out-of-the-box design that went into this bike, you do begin to appreciate that unscrupulous fiend’s envy.
Among the many “best of” lists spontaneously appearing on the CDM forums, contributors and readers have compiled a fantastic list of inspirational music videos from a variety of acts. One thing that strikes me is the breadth of aesthetics; whereas once electronica had very strong connotations (and the videos with it), these are really high-art experimental filmmaking with a range of styles. And they’re a pleasure to watch, too, like the fanciful Sigur Rós video pictured here. (Thanks, Jaymis!)
Are visual pairings with music the wave of the future? With video production costs getting cheaper by the day and modes of digital expression expanding, they offer a compelling alternative to the somewhat slackened interest in CDs. And it seems indie musicians are next in line. The one stumbling block there to me is services like YouTube. Sure, they offer wide compatibility and free distribution . . . but the fidelity is crap. Then again, that’s how MP3s started out.
Certainly, musicians are becoming more interested in crossing from aural to visual media, not only in videos but live visuals, as well. (And yes, CDM will be revisiting those topics soon.) For just an indication, take a look here:
Speaking of YouTube, those videos have been all over the Music thing blog lately, including fantastic Fairlight CMI and Kraftwerk videos. (What I notice about the Kraftwerk video: this once exotic kind of performance doesn’t really seem at all strange any more. Pity they never got the musical lapels working, though. Bet you can one-up them. Click through for other neat Kraftwerk YouTube videos.)
Got a favorite music video (independent or otherwise)? Produced one yourself? Let us know. I want my music television.
I’d been searching for a term that more accurately described the process of peer to peer meme propagation regardless of the network or service through which it spreads. Eventually I settled on the term “social forwarding” and started throwing it into conversations here and there over the past year or two, and I still haven’t heard it used very much.
Daniel Dennett missed out on a career as a whodunit writer. But I, for one, am glad, because what he has to tell us is more important than what you’ll find in the average crime novel. He boldly storms onto the philosophical crime scene, takes every puzzle ever to have exercised the human mind, gives it a good rinse in what he calls Darwin’s universal acid, and leaves us with the solution to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. You may not like the answers he comes up with, but you can’t help but admire the way he approaches his task. He outlines for us what the mystery is – just trifling ones like the origin of life, the physical basis of consciousness, stuff like that – and slowly and enticingly takes us through each step of his argument. Like watching an episode of Columbo, knowing whodunit at the start and that Columbo will find the answer doesn’t at all spoil the fun. Read his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Consciousness Explained, and you’ll see a true master at work. He may not have quite the same facility with language and colourful metaphor as his comrade in arms, Richard Dawkins, but his is a skill of a different yet equally impressive kind. In Dennett’s latest book on religion, you can still find some of the magic. The book as a whole, however, has to rank as a failure. Unlike his earlier work, it staggers from one poorly thought-through idea to another like – as Winston Churchill once put it – the men who stumble over the truth, but hastily pick themselves up and hurry on as if nothing has happened.
familiar with Dennett’s work, you would probably buy this book expecting a thoroughly materialist, Darwinian and scientific account of the evolutionary emergence – and continuing appeal of – religion. Surprisingly, he refuses to provide it.
If you have ever had to train for Red Cross certification,
you will know why this is funny and not just awful.
When I came upon this, I thought to myself,
‘Wow, I am actually, deeply creeped out by this!’ then I thought,
‘This is the kind of sick stuff the internet is all about
and yet is so rare these days!’
So, it is with great pleasure that I can share with you
thirteen disturbing minutes of First Aid presented by
LA based educational cult/performance art group Art of Bleeding Foundation.
Newoz writes - “Having a lot of CDs around with only a few words labeled on a silver faceplate is painful for the eyes. I have come up with an idea, for the last 2 years, of making your own CD cover by using only a few tools, a walkman, a couple of water-based or permanent marking pens and a clip.” - Link.
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Funky… reminds me of those spinner paintings I used to do at fairs. –AM
A while back, Tropolism announced Your Hidden City , an urban photography contest. Now, more than one thousand photographs later, the results are in… Instead of one overall winner, however, each juror will be posting his or her favorites, allowing for different standards, tastes, opinions, etc. So, as one of those jurors, I chose… the following: My personal favorite was this laundromat in Honolulu, which comes in under the category of “Best Hidden Place”:
That would make an absolutely killer book cover, for instance. For “Best Natural/Urban Overlap,” I chose this one:
For “Best Density,” I chose another photo by sgoralnick (I really like this one):
And, for “Best Building,” I chose this mausoleum-like horror movie grid/void, aka the Université Henri Poincaré in Nancy, France, photographed by a good-looking Norwegian man:
C’est tout. It was fun. Maybe we can keep this going, do a seasonal thing… Actually, here’s a runner-up for “Best Hidden Place”: hevy, for his/her documentation of Miami’s Ballardian back-side, of which this is just one example:
A few months ago, Pruned ran an excellent piece about farms for cloned meat. There, inside huge barns, rubbery mats of cloned muscle – stretched lumps of unBeef® – would vibrate, growing, pulsing, often ripping, beneath a steady stream of jelly-like vitamin wash. Nutrients would slide across those gleaming, fat-marbled surfaces… clumped and soapy. A handful of underpaid Mexican night-workers would then come through with industrial strength pizza cutters, chopping the meat-sheets into rectangular blocks. You would then buy one of those blocks, intending for your own kids to chew it and swallow it. This would be called “feeding them steak.” “Chicken.” “Pork.”
But what really interests me here is whether such a scenario might pose a new future for landscape design. What if someone were to develop, for instance, a kind of organic bio-paving for the world’s freeways, replacing asphalt? In which case: could you clone whole stretches of interstate? Cloverleaf junctions, skyways, off-ramps? Would summer road crews perform something more akin to skin-graft operations? Stretching huge films of living matter over the world’s dual carriageways. Minimal surfaces. And so on.
[Image: Frei Otto's architecture of minimal surfaces].
The risk, of course, would be that there’s some fatal, unknown flaw in your cloning technique and so, one day, the freeways wake up. They shake themselves free from the dirt and filth; they tuck their herniated loops of distant traffic circles up underneath themselves; and they walk away…
All of LA’s sprawling anatomy of freeways and cloverleaf junctions arises with a tectonic shiver from the arid sands of southern California, artificially intelligent, blinking with traffic lights, and it wanders free into the American desert. Shining. A kind of moving, hyperdimensional squid made of asphalt and miswired traffic control programs shambling into the mountains, raining cars.
It was Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote “Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain”. Although the musings of the German philosopher will certainly be lost on the millions of schoolchildren over the Easter holiday, their parents can find comfort in his words as they struggle to keep their kids entertained for a fortnight.
et out to prove that boredom - far from being a bad thing - is a naturally occurring emotion that should not be suppressed. Dr Richard Ralley, a psychology lecturer at Edge Hill College in Ormskirk, Lancashire, has embarked on a study of boredom.
He said: “Boredom can be a good thing. In psychology we think of emotions as being functional. Fear, anger and jealousy all serve a purpose but they’re painted in a bad light even though they exist for a reason. It’s the same with boredom, which also has a bad name.
“We get bored because we get fed up when we have nothing to do and feel the need to be productive. We feel bad when we’re not productive and that’s what boredom is associated with.”
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