Archive for September, 2006
At Ars Electronica's Cyber Arts exhibition I got to finally see after seeing a prototype video online last year, Max Sean, Raffaello D'Andrea, and Matt Donovan's 'Robotic Chair' project in action. The robotic chair can break apart and then wondrously re-build itself. A video of the chair in action at Ars Electronica is now online and will give you a much better impression of what the technology does than I could describe. It simultaneously leaves you with a sense of awe and a little creeped out. At the moment the project uses a vision system on the ceiling so it is not entirely autonomous however it is an interesting suggestion of future reconfigurable spaces.
Video
September 13th, 2006
On the openinng night of Ars Electronica I visited the KunstRaum Goethestraße to see Nicole Knauer’s remarkable installation ‘Curious Implantation ‘ made from 500,000 white plastic cable ties. Using a generic object for day to day electronics and every installation artists most basic tool she has made a landscape that from a distance appears soft and organic moving gently almost as if it is breathing. Only on closer inspection to you realise its manufactured rough bristly texture.
"The translucence, the ephemeral and the transience of the artist’s favourite materials and shapes that are represented in this installation can be regarded as a metaphor for the sphere between reality and absurdity." Nicole Knauer’s aim is to use synthetic waste products in a different way to that which was originally intended.
Nicole has also experimented with creating clothing using various colors of cable ties which resemble feathers or soft ribbons.
September 11th, 2006
"Re:orient – migrating architectures" explores the local aspects of China ’s global significance and increasing influence. The project seeks to forecast possibilities which are now detectable only along retail channels, but which will, in all likelihood, determine the built environment, which transforms under the pressure of ever cheaper products. The project follows up this train of thought with the presentation of spaces, architectural devices and materials that create new contents, and indicate ways of turning these constraints of the market to our benefit, demonstrating how to infuse the mass products, which are designed to have a short life-span, with lasting cultural values.
The Hungarian entry for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennial is an installation that presents an alternative contemporary architectural experience built from thousands of functioning networked Chinese toys.
Instead of form they focus on the system, as an alternative to authored design they created DIY methods, re-appropriating cheap and ubiquitous technologies.
The website provides growing in-depth information about the different parts to the project as well as the system qualities of their architectural experiment in Venice and all the code used is provided open source. I only wish I could make it to Venice to see it.
Chief co-ordinator is Attila Nemes along with Adam Somlai-Fischer co-ordinating the installation and Samu Szemerey the website. A selection of the research texts are available to read here. A full list of the people involved can be found here. Below are the links to the individual projects that make up the whole installation.
September 8th, 2006
magink display technologies have developed full-colour digital ink technology which manipulates the ink molecules to generate a full-colour spectrum including shades of grey. Images created with this technology can be viewed indoors and outdoors, using the ambient light to enhance the image visibility just like paper and ink.
magink produce a range of displays for this technology which can show static images or video content. The software that comes with the billboard systems allows the content to be altered in real-time. Displays can be stand-alone or networked across an ethernet connection.
via Karen at Mr. Watson
September 8th, 2006
Earlier this summer the Interactive Architecture Workshop aka Unit 14 of the Bartlett School of Architecture which I’m part of, were given a grant by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council ) to undertake a project devised by Unit 14 tutor Professor Stephen Gage called ‘Making an Ecology’.
video
A group of 8-10 year old inner city children at Betty Layward School joined the development of ‘Making an Ecology’ which aimed to teach them that it is possible to create objects that live in the physical world and interact with each other thus producing an ecology, where people are the intruders. For the interactive architecture students the project aimed to enable them to understand how sensing, activation and feedback systems can be used to create a time-based architecture, and how the role of design, especially the choreography of moving objects, is crucial to this.
Making an Ecology culminated in an installation comprising an interactive agent based floor projection, derived from the workshop recordings and developed by Research Assistant Andrew Huntington , and a floor sensing system which I created.
Below are some images of the drawings by the children who were asked to invent stories about their invented characters in storyboard form. These were then enacted by the children themselves. The performance was then filmed and used by Andrew Huntington to help him create the interactive animations.
September 7th, 2006
While I was in Linz, Austria for Ars Electronica, the Graffiti Research Lab put together a workshop to make as many LED throwies as they could and then organised a meeting in the town center to decorate the trams that run through the city. Unfortunately my video of the event seems to be corrupted but I’ve got one image of a lucky tram that got the GRL treatment. You should have seen the passengers of the trams faces when the crowd from Ars Electronica decended on them. You can see a some of the Graffiti Research Lab’s other events and documentation on their website.
An LED throwie is a small, battery-powered light, attached to a magnet (usually with conductive epoxy or electrical tape), used for the purpose of creating graffiti and light displays. They were devised by the Graffiti Research Lab as a new kind of graffiti art to be used on ferromagnetic surfaces.
see how to make an LED Throwie
September 6th, 2006
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