Sachiko Kodama & Yasushi Miyajima created these amazing music-synced ferrofluid sculptures-
“Morpho Towers–Two Standing Spirals” is an installation that consists of two ferrofluid sculptures that moves synthetically to music. The two spiral towers stand on a large plate that hold ferrofluid. When the music starts, the magnetic field around the tower is strengthened. Spikes of ferrofluid are born from the bottom plate and move up, trembling and rotating around the edge of the iron spiral.”
Morpho Towers - Two Standing Spirals, Thanks Technick29! Link.
The World’s first camera is currently on display in Capital Museum, Beijing, for an exhibition that presents the history of photography through Nicephore Niepce museum collections.
I’ve been working on a Super 8 movie making magazine called smallformat with a bunch of dedicated Super 8 filmmakers from Europe. We’re putting the finishing touches on our ninth issue this week. It’s an eclectic mix of nostalgia and modern filmmaking information that introduces the ‘digital generation’ to the magic of film.
it? They have started to offer free downloads of their articles in pdf format.
This is a project that I’ve invested a lot of sweat and tears into over the past 18 months. Even though it’s a tiny magazine with only a few thousand readers, we’re doing everything we can to make it world-class. Who knows… perhaps part of my love of film is that I was too young to use Super 8 in its heyday during the 1970s, but it’s a stunningly beautiful medium when combined with modern computer-based editing and effects software.
SMALLFORMAT · Aktuell - Themen der aktuellen Ausgabe - Link.
Fused deposition machines are an interesting class of rapid prototyping and art robots, capable of extruding paint onto a canvas or extruding to build up complex, three-dimensional objects one layer at a time. Naturally, one of the challenging parts of designing machines like these is designing and building a system for dispensing the printing medium. So, imagine how surprised we were when we were walking through the aisles of our local Michaels craft store and saw a pre-built extruder on the shelf for $20! Naturally, we picked one up because an extruder head might make a nice accessory for our own three dimensional printer.
So, what is it? It’s an inexpensive kit that can be used for developing your 2D or 3D printer extruder with an air-powered delivery system. For the price you can get a small air pump, tubing, syringes, tips, and dispenser. The components are simple and easily hackable, and it looks like a good set of tools for starting to build a simple extruder head for an art bot of some sort.
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - A $20 hackable extruder for your artbot or 3D printer - Link.
If you’ve got a dual channel oscilloscope handy (got mine for $49 on ebay), you can create some amazing imagery using the X-Y mode setting and/or ADD setting).
o is feed a separate signal (like a sine wave and a triangle wave for example) into each of the 2 channels, combine them into 1 signal using ADD, and adjust the signal frequencies til you get something like what you see below.
At some point, you hit a sweet spot that generates these images (these still images don’t really do the moving images justice, but the imagery is still asthetically pleasing. Some of the moving images rival Hollywood monitor effects.
Scope Art - Link.
A Chinese political prisoner and his wife sued Yahoo in federal court Wednesday, accusing the company of abetting the commission of torture by helping Chinese authorities identify political dissidents who were later beaten and imprisoned.
The suit, filed under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act, is believed to be the first of its kind against an Internet company for its activities in China.
Wang Xiaoning, who according to the suit is serving a 10-year prison sentence in China; his wife, Yu Ling; and other unnamed defendants seek damages and an injunction barring Yahoo from identifying dissidents to Chinese authorities.
Wired News reporter Luke O’Brien, who covered the story as it developed in this earlier piece, has an update today. Snip:
I just spoke with former dissident Harry Wu, who helped arrange Yu’s travel to the United States. He told me Yu Ling is leaving tomorrow morning to go back to China. Today she wanted to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. She walked the whole thing.
Link to post, with PDF of the legal complaint filed in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Update: ArsTechnica has a post, too: Link (Thanks, Glyn)
Attention circuit-benders, hardware hackers, techno-antique collectors, control panel enthusiasts, analog synth and Theramin fans, and marvelers of magnificent and mad machinery in general. This link will rock your world.
Tim Kaiser is a performance artist and experimental musician. He’s built dozens (and dozens) of crazy instruments and other sound-generating gadgets, many of them housed in antique Geiger counters, old telephones, Oscillator boxes, and other retro equipment cases. His site features page after page of amazing DIY tech art. I was swooning by the time I was done, and I don’t think I even exhausted the site. It seems to go on forever. Some of the machines have MP3 files attached to them so you can hear what the devices sound like.
One of the most linked-to pieces on Street Tech is the Gallery of Homebrewed Headphone Amps. This is an equally amazing collection of homemade audio gadgets. We can only hope that Tim Kaiser’s work generates a similar buzz.
The Suicide Food blog rounds up pictures of food advertisements in which the animal that’s about to be eaten is shown cavorting in anticipation of this happy moment.
7-How-7 sez, “The ‘Cut Me, Wicked Servant’ group on Flickr deals with the same topic as the Suicide Foods blog except using actual photos of restaurants, murals, ads, etc featuring an animal, maybe a cow or a pig or a sad sad chicken, about to slice himself up with a fork and knife.”
“Necessarium est autem veteres ortus cometarum habere collectos. Deprehendi enim propter raritatem eorum cursus adhuc non potest, nec explorari an vices servent et illos ad suum diem certus ordo producat”
[It is essential that we have a record of all the appearances of comets in former times. For, on account of their infrequency, their orbit cannot yet be discovered or examined in detail, to see they observe a periodical interval and whether their reappearance on a fixed day could be the result of certain cause] {Seneca, 60AD}
The text above is an excerpt from this book:
m Cometicum’ (The Theatre of Comets) was published in Amsterdam in 1668 and includes about 80 lavish engravings (a great many of them are double-page fold out illustrations). It provides accounts of over 400 comet sightings throughout history and in discussing their meaning, [Polish astronomer Stanislaus] Lubienietzki essentially helps usher in a more astronomical rather than astrological approach to the study of comets.
Link to more text and scanned images pages, taken from the wonderful old-book blog Bibliodyssey. The editor adds,
data visualization for the masses: a new real-time monitor that will help cut greenhouse gas emissions & the amount of energy wasted by appliances being left on standby is now proposed to be freely distributed in UK households.
the MorePower device aims to give people more information about their energy consumption by displaying the cost of energy & carbon emissions over time & for each device. “the visual language is designed to let non-expert users quickly & easily understand the messy world of energy-use without becoming boring energy geeks.”
a data visualization artwork based on data from a building monitoring system that gathers electricity, condensate, & chilled water usage figures in real time. the purpose of the eco-visualization is to make key environmental performance data publicly accessible & easy to understand for everyone.
the so-called eco-visualization is composed of a sequence of animated clips using a series of tree images that correspond to the carbon loads in the building. an accompanying website invites building residents to make individual public commitments to reduce their own carbon footprint.
a Google Maps mashup that provides current & local sickness information to the public, without the need of dealing with hospitals or doctors. users can post, discuss, search or analyze sickness trends & outbreaks, varying between a runny nose, cough, muscle ache, headache, fever & stomach ache.
a dynamic screensaver & an online game as alternative means to access real-time news headlines. the NewsStream screensaver represents up to 14 RSS feeds from the msnbc.com website, which can be configured so the colors match individual feeds. the NewsBreaker game merges the classic pong “breakout” game with retrieving actual news headlines while destroying a wall of bricks.
“an advanced visualization technique to make complex network performance data simple. users with any level of technical proficiency can instantly visualize the performance of network traffic on an enterprise network”.
the dynamic 3D world represents network traffic in new video game-like audio-visual paradigm, using color, shape, speed, size, changes in sound tone & level, & even smoke, fire, & explosions.
height="132" class="pic" /> Impulse shoppers, watch out. Your cellphone might soon get you into trouble. A company called ShopText has introduced a system that lets people buy products instantly using text messages, a process that eliminates the need to go to a store or even to visit a Web site. For instance, a woman seeing an ad for a pocketbook in a magazine can order it on the spot simply by sending the text code found beside the item through her cellphone. (INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE)
This is really scary. Drunk dialing will take on a whole new set of ramifications! –DB
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height="132" class="pic" /> Impulse shoppers, watch out. Your cellphone might soon get you into trouble. A company called ShopText has introduced a system that lets people buy products instantly using text messages, a process that eliminates the need to go to a store or even to visit a Web site. For instance, a woman seeing an ad for a pocketbook in a magazine can order it on the spot simply by sending the text code found beside the item through her cellphone.