“Untitled (UFO)” is an art project conceived by established New York artist Peter Coffin and created in collaboration with London-based Cinimod Studio. Coffin had for a while been wanting to create a public UFO flight performance, but it was not until he met Cinimod that he had the confidence to proceed with making his vision a reality. After an intense period of structural and electrical design, and fabrication, the UFO made its inaugural public appearance on 4th July 2008 as a part of the Gdansk Festival of Stars.
The overall UFO structure is 7 metres in diameter and manufactured of aluminum for lightness. 3000 bright and individually controllable Color Kinetics LED nodes have been arrayed across the structure and are controlled via a solid state computer. An on board 6 kw generator provides the system power, and the overall UFO can be remotely controlled via SMS messaging.
Sometimes things are best left as they are so I’ve gone back to the original look for the site. Seems like everyone is pimping up their blogs and I’m not much of a web designer so I’m making as bad a job of it as most of the others are. Long Live IA.O v1
Britain’s first eco-nightclub is to open this summer qith plans to install an energy-generating dancefloor, which would harness power from the pounding of clubbers’ feet and convert it into electricity.
Although entry to the club costs £10, those customers who can prove they travelled there by foot, bicycle or public transport will be allowed in free. Mr Charalambous, the head of a new climate change organisation called Club4Climate, said he hoped to use clubbing to inspire young people to tackle global warming. “This is a new way to draw in the young generation,” he said… It’s a sexy and fresh approach as opposed to the way young people feel they are preached to by other more ‘grown-up’ charities…Our aim in opening the country’s first ecological club is to get as many people as possible involved in saving their world…There is no greater platform than clubbing to reach out to young people. Having an energy-generating dancefloor is a very exciting and interesting-idea that we have been talking to people in Rotterdam about. Such a dancefloor could generate about 60 per cent of the building’s energy.” via Evening Standard & Daily Mail
DigiWall from the Interactive Institute looks like a traditional climbing-wall but it’s actually a computer game you climb upon. Every climbing-hold is equipped with a sensor that registers hands and feet. In that way DigiWall can keep track on where on the wall the climber or climbers are. This opens up for a large number of games, exercises and competitions of various kinds. DigiWall is also a musical instrument. The climbing-holds acts as keys on a keyboard and music is played according to your climbing. The grips can be lit up from the inside and behind the wall there is a large hi-fi system. Together this gives a climbing-wall with new possibilities. In games, competitions, for practicing co-operation and for music creativity the experience intensifies with help from the music and the sound. The built-in light in the holds show you the way and rules for competition.
Etoy.corporation launched the Mission Eternity Project in 2005, foregrounding on the one hand respect for the human longing to survive in some way after death, and on the other a sense of irony about dated sci-fi fantasies we contrive to satisfy that desire. The Sarcophagus is one materialization of this project. It is a mobile sepulchre that holds and displays portraits of those who wish to have their informational remains cross over into a digital afterlife. The size of a standard cargo container that can travel to any location in the world, the Sarcophagus has an immersive LED screen covering its walls, ceiling and floor. There, interactive digital portraits can be summoned via mobile phone or web browser from virtual capsules that are stored in the shared memory of thousands of networked electronic devices of Mission Eternity Angels (people who contribute a small part of their personal storage capacity to the mission, currently 765 of them; to date, 2 volunteers have been accepted for encapsulation).
The data spectres that populate this tenuous memorial space are composed of details of lives lived, in visual, audio and text fragments. But when they are summoned in lo-res pixellated form in the Sarcophagus, they resemble one merged personality. The massing of details that we find in archives and records that keep the dead with us has a similar compositing effect, yet the Sarcophagus is also very unlike those. It gives us access to a novel social world generated among networked computer users who have a common goal of keeping something alive, which can invoke intense feelings such as care and wonder.
ALAVS 2.0
Jed Berks’ Autonomous Light Air Vehicles combine many of the themes of artificial life and multi-agent robotics research in an accessible and elegant public presentation. These include capable powered navigation and obstacle avoidance, organized multi-agent behaviour (such as flocking), discernable (quasi) intelligent individual behaviour, and interaction with other (quasi) intelligent agents, i.e., people. Connecting these agendas with more contemporary interest in mobile and locative technologies, Berk has implemented human-ALAV communication via mobile phone technology. The rigors of such a project must not be elided.
While robots in research-lab contexts often exhibit remarkable capabilities, they are just as often delicate, unreliable and require the constant attention of one or several highly trained staff. A project like ALAVs must exhibit its qualities in the general public, must inform and entertain, and at the same time be robust and resilient to the unpredictabilities of unusual architectures and architectural materials, weather, children and crowds (and sometimes, animals) - influences which are almost always filtered out in the controlled environment of the lab.
The ALAVs achieve all this, while remaining lighter than air, an achievement in itself given the weight of batteries and other components. The ALAVs are beguilingly delicate translucent agents which drift and float in a most un-robotic way. Videos
I’ve been playing with openFrameworks (currently in prerelease) for the past couple of days for a project I currently doing. I have to say that it is extremely powerful and a great introduction to C++ programming. “OpenFrameWorks, is a new open source, cross platform, c++ library, which was designed by Zachary Lieberman (US) and Theo Watson (UK) to make programming in c++ for students accessible and easy. In it, the developers wrap several different libraries like opengl for graphics, quicktime for movie playing and capturing, and free type for font rendering, into a convenient package in order to create a simple, intuitive framework for creating projects using c++. It is designed to work in freely available compilers, and will run under any of the current operating systems” Coming from a processing.org background which has satisfied all my needs till now, I really got interested in openFrameworks because of my increasing use of computer vision. While I never had the confidence to use C++ from scratch, to build computer vision software, openFrameworks offers a lot of the building blocks to let you go straight to the design phase. Check out the video above to find out more about the scope of openFrameworks and join the mailing list.
