Cardboardesign had such a good initial response to its cardboard furniture and decorative products they decided to open a commercial website. “With prices ranging from $36 - $160, everyone can own a piece. From penthouses to playhouses, the furniture fits in any dwelling”. They suggest that their desktops, like that of the pictured ZenTable, take on a “lacquered look” if the top is varnished. Look for traditional (non-urethane) marine spar varnish if you decide to go that route. Examples of custom decorated versions of the table are shown here. The TreeHugger favored quote from the website promo: “Not one [1] tree was cut down to produce our furniture & packaging.”.
Minka houses are Japan’s equivalent of our log cabins. Until the middle of the twentieth century, most ordinary country people lived in them. They were built using local materials such as wood and paper, and techniques such as thatch and no nails, that were suited to the local climate and lifestyles. The mud-plastered walls and thatched roof structure were resistant to earthquakes and easy to rebuild. In northern Japan, they had steep roofs and small windows to cope with the long snowy winters; in the hot south, they were small and low with raised floors– well-ventilated and typhoon resistant. Today, many minkas are being demolished and the craftsmen disappearing. But people are beginning to realize that they are the ideal recycleable house, sympathetic to the environment and using local sustainable materials.
Forbes On-Line reports that: “Selling your old phone, once you upgrade to a fancier model, can be like handing over your diaries.” Maybe that’s why those guys at the cell phone recycle center are always smiling? More from Forbes: - “A popular practice among sellers, resetting the phone, often means sensitive information appears to have been erased. But it can be resurrected using specialized yet inexpensive software found on the Internet…Trust Digital of McLean, Va., tested 10 different used phones and…recovered information was equal to 27,000 pages - a stack of printouts 8 feet high”. If you’ve sold a phone on eBay or given one away to someone you really don’t know that well, the article will probably give you that sinking feeling. Although the analysis focused mainly on the re-selling of high-end devices by frequent upgraders, the risk obviously extends to recycling more basic models as well. Perhaps there is a business opportunity for entrepreneurs who can, for a minor fee, lobotomize used electronics before a trip to the recycling center or simply prep them for shipping to a donator-named third party.
The Seawater Greenhouse offers a low cost, sustainable solution to the problem of providing water for agriculture in arid, coastal regions. “The process uses seawater to cool and humidify the air that ventilates the greenhouse and sunlight to distill fresh water from seawater. This enables the year round cultivation of high value crops that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to grow in hot, arid regions…The overall process is extremely energy efficient. 1kW of electricity expended on pumping will remove 500kW of heat. Water can be produced at low energy costs (<3kWh/m3)”. Much better than building a nuclear power plant to run a traditional desal unit. See earlier TreeHugger post on an analogous, but far less promising looking project here .
Most 3D animated shorts seem so interested in the technology than in the story or the emotions. This piece by director Christopher Arcella (same director as this) uses 3D in a very original way.
At Art Fag City last Friday I suggested that there was not enough dog art being exhibited. This link sent to eyebeam is concievably a response to that post. -PJ
bur.ble n.: 1. A gurgling or bubbling sound, as of running water. 2. A rapid, excited flow of speech. 3. A separation in the boundary layer of fluid about a moving streamlined body, such as the wing of an airplane, causing a breakdown in the smooth flow of fluid and resulting in turbulence.
In Open Burble, a crowd of participants designs and constructs a “burble” that rises towards the sky like a plume of smoke. The project came about because we wanted to find a way to use the technology developed for Sky Ear in a more intuitive way that enables people to engage directly with the tactile experience of flying the cloud.
Participants will divide into groups in order to assemble about 140 hexagonal “clouds” into a complete Burble, built to such a scale that, when inflated with helium, it will soar upwards like Jack’s beanstalk. Just as the participants are the generators of the Burble’s 60m tall form, so too are they the ones to control it. They hold on to it using handles with which they may position the Burble as they like. They may curve in on themselves, or pull it in a straight line - the form is a combination of the crowd’s desires and the impact of wind currents varying throughout the height of the Burble.
The Burble will move, rustle, tangle, fold in on itself and create turbulence as the wind catches it like a sail. Suddenly, the entire construction will ignite with colour, sparkling in the evening sky. As people on the ground shake and pump the handle bars of the Burble, they will see their movements echoed as colours through the entire system. They will see their own individual fragments, perhaps even identifying design choices they have made. Their invididual contributions will become an integral part of a spectacular, ephemeral experience many times their size that they have come together to produce. [via Interactive Architecture dot Org]
Lise Autogena’s Sound Mirrors Project is inspired by the derelict acousic mirrors at Denge, England, it aims to create two new sound mirrors on the coast of England and France which will enable people on either side of the Channel to speak to each other.
Listener on his platform and Across the Channel
The Channel Communication Amplifier incorporates the latest technology to transmit sound but has at its heart a device first developed before to World War II and the invention of radar: the acoustic mirrors built as early warning devices around the coasts of Britain to detect airborne invasions. These giant concrete dishes also existed in mobile and even wearable versions btw.
Autogena plans to build two acoustic mirrors. One will be placed in Folkestone, the other will be sited on the coast of France, 25 miles across the Channel.
Visitors will be able to climb up to a listening platform in front of the mirror and listen to the sounds of the sea, as well as for voices speaking to them from across the Channel. Standing at the focus point the person will hear a complete �holographic� binaural sound image which will appear to be coming from the air all around them.
Lise Autogena also worked together with Joshua Portway on the beautiful Stock Market Planetarium, a planetarium of stars, each one representing a company and its relative value on the stock market.
I was watching a Siggraph 2005 video and 1 min 45 seconds in, they show an early prototype video of Tenori-On, a whole 10 seconds of it :) Possibly interesting to anyone who has been following the development. Watch here.
[from interview mp3 ]
“These collaborative projects came about through their common interest in gesture and audio visual performance. They have been working together since 2002 under the name tmema (which means little pieces). Each project is made up of many small ideas to make a larger project. The installations Remark and Hidden worlds (from 2002) we based upon the idea of visualizing the voice, if you could see the voice, what would it look like? This led on to Messa di Voce, a performance work. Their work tends to operate in both domains of installation and performance. The works are accessible to children and adults, are universal, playful and expresive. Have fun and learn things. They like to see people experience shock and wonder, not to be afraid, nothing will break. They wish they had these kinds of exhibitions when they were young. Golan was very much more interested in interactive works in the childrens exhibitions, rather than static artworks, so hopes they can give the next generation an idea about the future”.
Now this is a kids exhibition I’d cetainly like to see.
In December 2005 Nokia opened its first Flagship Store in Moscow. The Nokia press release states: we want to offer a relaxing, interactive environment for consumers to truly experience the power of mobility. …Interactive, multimedia displays will engage visitors as they visit the store, encouraging them to share images or send messages to friends.
Nanika, a London based interaction company, created works for these displays and documentation has started to emerge.
In Wind, shop visitors can send an SMS message to the shop, then see the message appear in animated typographic form. Words break away from the sentence, getting blown across the screens through various landscapes. The landscapes are customised for each store location.
Liquid Canvas is an ambient background, creating natural organic animations from images selected by the store. In future it may be possible for shop visitors to upload images.
“The AV system in a Nokia Flagship store consist of anything from 28 to 42 high-resolution LCD screens with up to 18 of them placed next to each other acting as a single canvas, depending on the layout of the particular store”.
Andreas Müller, co-founder of Nanika, created a project called For All Seasons in 2005, which features some great dynamic typographic animation in a 3D environment.
In 1951, a sound designer on a Gary Cooper western called Distant Drums needed to overdub a scream onto a scene in which a man is killed by an alligator. He brought a contract actor into his studio and rolled tape as the man did six brief, anguished screams in one take. These screams were then added to the Warner Brothers sound library, and over the next couple of decades they found their way into dozens of Warner Brothers films.
In the mid-’70s, a young sound designer named Ben Burtt gave these sounds a name: “the Wilhelm scream,” after a character in one of the earliest films that utilized the sounds. A couple of years later, Burtt was hired to work on a film called Star Wars. As an homage, he overdubbed the scream onto a scene in that film. Then he overdubbed it onto a scene in The Empire Strikes Back. And Return of the Jedi. A fellow Lucasfilm sound designer began using the Wilhelm too, in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, among other movies. And thus a film-geek in-joke was born. In the last 30 years the Wilhelm has been used winkingly in dozens of movies and TV shows, from Reservoir Dogs and The X-Files to Aladdin and Return of the King. More details are at Hollywood Lost and Found.
The video below is a compilation of dozens of Wilhelms from the last half-century.
Early on a summer morning in 1978, the French filmmaker Claude Lelouch attached a gyro-stabilized camera to the front of a Ferrari 275GTB. He turned on the camera and handed the car keys to a professional racecar driver, who fired up the engine and then sped through the center of Paris at about 140 miles per hour. The resulting eight-minute film, C’etait un rendezvous, is a classic. Thanks to Google Video and YouTube, it’s gotten a lot of web attention in recent months. But here’s something new: A blogger named Brian Hendrix has created a Google Maps mashup that displays the car’s location on a map as the driver rockets himself through Paris:
Lelouch has apparently claimed that it was he who was behind the wheel; he supposedly also said that the car was a Mercedes, not a Ferrari, and that the sounds of a Ferrari were overdubbed later. But I don’t have the energy to investigate whether (a) he actually claimed these things or (b) the claims are actually true.
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Autogena plans to build two acoustic mirrors. One will be placed in Folkestone, the other will be sited on the coast of France, 25 miles across the Channel.
