In its quest to bring to light cutting edge contemporary artforms, today PBS’s Off Book series took on the wild world of creative coding. Encapsulating the burgeoning but expansive culture into a six-minute crash course, we hear from NYU’s Daniel Shiffman advocating for the intuitive “learning by doing” ideology behind Processing, followed by Barbarian’s Keith Butters, who helped develop Cinder, which gave birth to such ubiquitous products of creative coding as the iTunes visualizer.

Finally, James George and Jonathan Minard explain openFrameworks and their RGB+D Toolkit, which applies creative coding to the discipline of filmmaking in a new age. They’re using these new tools to visualize us the way we perceive ourselves today—as digital entities, avatars that represent a virtual form of ourselves. Included in the Off Book piece are a few grabs from their forthcoming film CLOUDS, currently in production.

In fact, the CLOUDS Kickstarter project is just shy of its goal, so if the episode above strikes a chord with you and you want to support this type of art, you can show them some love here. Watch their documentary trailer below to see the future of filmmaking that you’ll help fund.

Such is the power of LEGO that you don’t even need to make anything actually practical to still impress most of the internet. And so it goes with this device, the LEGO Axle Sorter, which is an engineering uber-feat that can sort LEGO axle pieces automatically. Yes, gone are the days when the Japanese designer of the machine, Akiyuki, has to go through the laborious and just plain unfair task of having to sort LEGO axle pieces by hand.

He’s built this crazy machine which uses only one motor and it’s so complex it will make your brain hurt just watching the video. But it’s still mesmerizing to see the mechanics in action as the pieces ride along on the conveyor belt, getting sorted before ending up in neat piles corresponding to their various shapes and sizes.

Akiyuki is also the LEGO don behind the Great Ball Contraption—his 600-hour masterwork. Just what will he build next? A LEGO Mars Exploration Rover? The LEGO Hadron Collider? We can but wait.

[via The Awesomer]

@stewart23rd

For all the complex, intricate, and stunning sculptures 3D printing can facilitate, it’s the idea that the mechanism can actualize something that was once just a 2D image (digital or otherwise) that makes it such an intriguing piece of tech. From Minecraft figures to printed records, producing a physical version of something intangible is what gives 3D printing a sense of doing something magical.

And what could be more magical (in a cheesy, Disney kind of way) than bringing a kid’s drawing to life? Crayon Creatures will take your kid’s terrible terribly cute drawing that’s supposed to be an elephant but looks like a bunny with a weight problem, and turns it into a sandstone figurine—proving that nowhere is safe from this technology. So instead of just having your child’s art litter your fridge door, you can now have it litter your entire house.

And if your parents have kept any drawings you did as a kid, now’s the time to get them birthed into 3D physicality. Take a look at some of the designs from their site, below.

Here’s a hamster in a speedboat, because we all know hamsters love speedboats.

The sun, looking a bit green in the gills

A giant girl captured moments before she tore this house down and went on a Godzilla-esque rampage.

[via Waxy.org]

@stewart23rd

When it comes to what typeface to use, we all like to stick to what we know. Maybe you’re a Helvetica person or maybe you favor Arial. Or maybe you like to troll people like the scientists at CERN by using Comic Sans.

Designer Mauro De Donatis likes to mix things up a bit while getting experimental and has created a series of styles that push the limits of what a usable typeface might look like.

Taking an aesthetic of our digital age he’s created Glitched Helvetica, along with a Kraftwerk-inspired style called KWERK Font, the Stripes Font, and the intricate Tangle Font among others.

You can check them out below.

Glitched Helvetica

KWERK Font

Stripes Font

Tangle Font

You can find more of Mauro De Donatis’ work in our Behance Gallery. Join now for the chance to be featured on our blog, website, and at our events.

@stewart23rd

It was a short week on the blog because 2012 decided to end, but here’s what went down: We did a tech Q&A with Studio Roosegaarde, a student created a concept for a musical genie in a bottle, we found out what 10,000 images combined into an instance of dancing looked like, witnessed some impossibly possible 3D sculptures created using a home printer, and found out what a spotmap color blueprint of Beasts of the Southern Wild looked like. We also profiled face electrifier Daito Manabe and looked at a Soundcloud mixing tool from OKFocus.

And on the web…

· Bruce Sterling discusses code in this exert from the CLOUDS documentary.

·Vomiting Larry is a robot that can puke.

· Something we could all do with is this medical alert bracelet (above).

·The Deep End is a psychedelic animation drawn using coffee (and ink).

· William Shatner tweeted with an astronaut on the ISS.

@stewart23rd

It’s been over a year since R.E.M. disbanded, but we’ve still been enthralled with Michael Stipe’s active Tumblr and the artistic works of the former frontman, many of which he discusses in the video above.

After a busy holiday season of surprise performances of “Losing My Religion” and singing duets with both Saul Berenson and Inigo Montoya on The Colbert Report, Michael Stipe celebrates his 53rd birthday today.

To wish him a happy birthday, we’ve slapped together this little tribute letter that is sure to delight and annoy Mr. Stipe in equal parts, mainly because we’ve turned REM’s classic song titles into really bad wordplay.

Dear Mr. Stipe,

Happy Birthday! Even thought we’re “Half A World Away” over here in Brooklyn, we sincerely hope you’re spending your special day surrounded by “Shiny Happy People.” Just pop open a refreshing “Orange Crush” and ignore any and all bummers in your life, because as you know better than anyone, “Everybody Hurts,” but soon after “Sweetness Follows.” By the way, are you going to wear that really great “Hairshirt” of yours? We’re not sure where you got it or what type of “Strange Currencies” were required to purchase it, but it looks awesome on you. Lastly, if you’re going to drink today, please avoid the impulse to do any “Night Swimming.”

Sincerely,

The Creators Project

@ImYourKid

Our Creators are a talented and prolific bunch, and our inbox is always overflowing with alerts of new remixes and mashups from the incredible DJs and producers in our line-up. We just couldn’t keep these fresh new tunes to ourselves because, after all, filesharing is caring. Here are our top picks from the past week. For past Creators Remix Roundups, click here.

The xx: “Sunset” (Jamie xx rework)

Even though producer Jamie xx is technically already a member of The xx, he turns his production chops once again on “Sunset” (much like he did for “Reconsider”) doubling the track time and cutting the track up with stalls, loops, and adding an extended intro. When the beat picks up after the five-minute mark, we’re once again shaking our heads at the producer’s ability to make the ever-introspective xx into something danceable.

Florence + the Machine: “What The Water Gave Me” (Retroid re-rub)

Florence + the Machine‘s ominous and skatter-brained sounding instrumentation on “What The Water Gave Me” gets a re-rub from Hungarian producer and DJ Retroid. He turns down the powerful vocals and adds in his own beats and twinkling melodies, transforming the song from orchestral to something a little more cinematic. If you’re into it, download the remix here.

Ellie Goulding: “Anything Could Happen” (Birdy Nam Nam remix)

French turntablists Birdy Nam Nam churn out a remix of buzzy British popstar Ellie Goulding‘s “Anything Can Happen.” Musically, they render it pretty unrecognizable until Goulding’s Grimes-esque cries come in. Props to Birdy Nam Nam for the subtle call and response effect. It’s a few months old, but it’s banging.

@CreatorsProject

Danny Perez has lent his expertise to a number of bands, augmenting their sonic expressions with visuals that range from beautiful (Animal Collective) to straight up twisted (Hot Chip). If you’re in New York this Sunday, you can see Perez’s genius at work at MoMA PS-1, where he’ll be providing the dynamic backdrop for IUD, a collaboration between Lizzi Bougatsos of Gang Gang Dance and Sadie Laska of Growing. Compared to Perez’s previous work that we’ve covered, this performance delves into far darker territory and promises to be a real scream.

Check out Perez in action in our video below, going behind the scenes of his video for Hot Chip’s “Look At Where We Are.” And below that, see our interview with Gang Gang Dance.

Get the full details of the show here.

@ImYourKid

Fascinated with the idea and appearance of refracted light, Icelandic artist Harald Haraldsson’s first music video endeavor brings us an unexpected spectacle created from an empty wall of bookshelves, which he’s transformed into a dynamic canvas for video projection. Aesthetically reminiscent of his previous art installation PRISMA 1666 (a collaboration with Super Nature), “Love With You”—a musical collaboration between Reykjavik-based producer B.G. Baarregaard and singer/actor Alexander Briem—is a striking and upbeat music video that demonstrates Haraldsson’s ability to manipulate our visual perception—this time via everyday furniture.

Haraldsson explains more about the video’s intention, “the song is simple and clean, but builds up really nicely. We wanted to reach the same visual experience, with movement and colors being the building elements as the song reaches its climax. The two people become more dynamic throughout the video and finally come together at the end.”

Smaller in scale than his other recent projects, Haraldsson created the music video by himself in his apartment over the course of one night. He programmed an openFrameworks app to delay individual color channels and to generate rotating lines on the black-and-white performance recordings. Then the visuals were projected onto a Random bookcase designed by MDF Italia. As the camera’s perspective changes, the video fractures, stretches, and even integrates 3D.

The video’s production setup.

Images courtesy of Harald Haraldsson.

@CreatorsProject

Rafaël Rozendaal is an artist who usually uses the internet as a canvas for his interactive works, showcasing his art in the gallery space of cyberland, but that doesn’t mean he’s completely restricted to the web. In a new project, which he completed in just 24 hours, he takes the medium of the car, a Ford Fiesta painted white, and projection maps his piece into time.us onto it to bring his colorful visions into augmented reality life.

You might be startled at the idea of someone who’s often dubbed an internet artist being used to advertise a popular car for the Italian arm of a major car manufacturer, but artists using cars as a medium goes way back. BMW even have a whole series called BMW Art Cars where artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, and plenty more created designs for various BMW models.

To learn more about Rafaël Rozendaal’s work, watch our documentary on him below.

@stewart23rd

While many of us hear about the prospect of lifelogging, you might consider that our social media feeds are essentially timelines of our lives, including pictures, thoughts, and places we’ve been. We are all, in essence, lifeloggers, and even though we share extensive details of our lives in multiple formats, we still tend to miss the small moments. And whether or not you think those moments should stay undocumented for sentimental reasons, we’re heading towards the capability of capturing it all. Considering that we’ll all soon be wearing Google’s Project Glass and its competitors, Memoto is a natural step.

Memoto is a small, wearable 5MP camera that photographs your life for you, automatically taking two snaps every minute of whatever you happen to be doing. It might not be something you want to strap on while sitting at your desk on the average weekday, and it’s hard to say how the angles and framing of automatic photos will come out, but it just might save you from missing out on that one priceless shot. An iPhone app allows you to sift through your photos to find the ones worth keeping.

Wafaa Bilal’s embedded skull camera

Similar territory has previously been explored by artists like Wafaa Bilal, who actually embedded the camera into a hole drilled into his skull, which was eventually rejected by his body. Another example is Eric Siu with his Touchy device, which turns the whole thing on its head by requiring the wearer to make human contact to activate the camera. But now this wearable camera idea has moved from artistic concept to consumer reality.

This prospect may seem a little scary, a move toward jettisoning our last scraps of privacy in the digital age, but our great grandparents may have felt the same way about photography in general. Whatever our trepidations, we can rest assured that they’ll be replaced by brand new concerns that we can’t even conceive of yet once items like this become ubiquitous.

[via FastCo.Design]

If you’re paranoid about being spotted from above by roaming drones should they come to invade our skies, then you’re probably going to need some kind of anti-spy clothing to shield you from their machine gaze.

In a new exhibition called Stealth Wear: New Designs For Counter Surveillance at Primitive London, NYC artist Adam Harvey—who previously came up with ways to style yourself to evade facial-recognition software with his CV Dazzle—will explore the idea of anti-surveillance fashion in collaboration with fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield.

The show will feature a range of wearables that could help you go undetected by the machines that watch over us. The clothing on show will feature an anti-drone hoodie and anti-drone scarf, which work by blocking thermal imaging technology which can be used by drones to spot their human prey. If you’re traveling abroad you could check out their XX-shirt which protects the wearer’s heart from X-rays and if you need to shut down your phone in a hurry then look no further than the Off Pocket, “an anti-phone accessory that allows you to instantly zero out your phone’s signal.”

The exhibition will take place January 18th-31st in London with additional support from Tank Magazine.

@stewart23rd

[via Prosthetic Knowledge]

Digital artist Sterling Crispin—the curator behind Netstyl.es—just released the documentation for his latest work Plein Air 001 (Entropy, Terror, and the Sublime within a Cyberspace Landscape).

Conceived for the California NanoSystems Institute’s AlloSphere—a 30-foot in diameter immersive virtual reality chamber—Plein Air 001 is an immersive algorithmic landscape where virtual flora grow and disappear within an echo-free 360-degree space.

The echo-free nature of the chamber “creates the sensation of being in a quiet open-space of an infinite dimension,” according to Crispin’s artist statement. “I consider the Allosphere as a portal, a vessel, a kind of high-fidelity threshold into the virtual and means of communing with this ‘other of another kind.’ In this context I found it appropriate to spill certain fundamental properties of organic growth and life into this other-space and allow for the kinds of mutations that might naturally emerge in a machine-language environment,” he continues.

The piece was developed in C++ and uses the Lindenmayer System to generate the “DNA” of the virtual plants. The title of the piece was inspired by by French impressionists such as Monet and Renoir who popularized the act of painting outdoors, which is essentially what Crispin is mimicking in the virtual realm.

Plein Air 001 also explores themes like the colonization of the American West and the sublime, furthering Crispin’s ongoing quest through the infinite nature of cyberspace. Crispin sums it up best by email, “it’s like walking into the future, or a set from a Star Trek or X-men movie.”

See for yourself in the video above.

The Allosphere from just beyond the bridge looking inward.

Behind-the-scenes view from the third floor of the Allosphere looking inward on the sphere.

@kfloodwarning

We’ve had Facebook: The Movie courtesy of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, now you can have a watch of Status Update: The Movie courtesy of artist Rajeev Basu. For better or worse it uses Facebook status updates to form its narrative, which dictates that it’s slightly inane and features such oddities as the great non-massacre of 2080, a goldfish funeral, a GPS system with the worst intentions, a video game about waiting in line, and other non-sequiturs.

The whole thing is kind of absurd and silly with a pervading sense of inexplicability—which makes it a pretty accurate representation of Facebook status updates. And if you’re confused by what’s occuring in this cartoon world, as you inevitably will be, the status updates which the segments are based on are revealed at the end.

[via Lost At E Minor]

@stewart23rd

One of my favorite albums of 2012 was Dirty Art Club’s Hexes, and I was super excited to do a LAYERS piece with them before the year was out. I soon discovered the label Hexes came out on, Phonosaurus, has a roster of incredible artists with a similar vibe, and I quickly sought to bring some of their tracks here to the LAYERS lab, where we can pick them apart and have a listen inside. I’m delighted to start 2013 off with The Broken Orchestra’s “To A Place,” from their new album Shibui.

From The Broken Orchestra:

“To a Place” had been an idea of ours for a long time. The way we normally work is by sitting down together and writing very simple riffs or chord progressions. The ideas are very spontaneous and frequent and there are a lot of nice ideas that haven’t come to light yet because we haven’t given them the chance to develop. The idea for “To a Place” originated from a simple guitar idea that Carl had. We tracked the idea just so we didn’t forget it then we shelved it for the better part of a year before eventually deciding we wanted to try and develop it. The idea with this track was to make it really really simple and stripped back but to try and make it feel like it didn’t need anything else to carry it. The idea was eventually that Anna’s vocals and the feel of the other parts would be enough to hold the listener. We ran into quite a few problems with this track and it was a really fun process seeing it through and hearing it develop.

Acoustic Guitar

This is the original guitar that we tracked in order to just get the idea down. Our thoughts were to keep the acoustic guitar as the basis of the track, but once we sent it to Anna (who re-wrote it on piano because she felt it was easier to write to), it became a piano track which then made us think that we wanted to have something like an organ part to carry the main progression instead. For a long time we had a synth organ on there as we didn’t have access to a real hammond. This was until we took the plunge and purchased a Hammond M Series to use primarily on this track. The journey to acquire the organ is a story in itself as it took three of us a full 12-hour day to travel across the country in a van which then broke down mid-journey requiring us to rent a van to complete the rest of the trip. When we arrived it turned out the organ was the heaviest thing known to man and needed to be carried down a flight of stairs. Anyway, we made it and it’s sitting in our studio now.

Organ

So as already mentioned, the organ took the place of the acoustic guitar as the main focus for the chord progression of the track. The organ was really tricky to get right, both in feel and sound. It was played by the excellent Dan Foster who plays the majority of the keys in our work. We recorded for a long time on this session as the feel and the sound were really important to us. Our main problem was that we didn’t have a leslie speaker, which made attaining that leslie sound quite difficult, so we looked for alternative options. We placed a microphone on the front speaker grill and then removed the back of the organ and placed a microphone on the inside. We then blended these recordings together. The inside gave a nice dirty sound with the front adding some nicer clarity to the blend. The organ section itself is pieced together from about three or four different takes, but in essence we tried to keep it quite natural and keep the flow of the playing there as we wanted it to feel quite live and organic.

Drums

The drums on this track were recorded quite late on in the process and we had some very simple programmed drums in for ages to allow us track all the other instruments to. We wanted the drums to be really simple but just do enough to let the track flow and move. We had a couple of attempts at recording sessions on drums and eventually had a very productive session where we got the drum sound and feel we were after. The drummer on this track is Martin Hyde who is a local and good friends with a friend of ours. He is only featured on this track on the album but completely nailed the feel we wanted straight away. We wanted to keep the drums fairly open and live in both the recording and mix. We used a fairly standard drum recording set up placing microphones on kick, two on snare, hi-hats, over heads, and one ribbon room mic, we have some nice Universal Audio pre-amps which we use for most recording purposes. They are valve-based and can be driven to give a nice gritty sound if needed. With regard to mix, we kept it quite simple. We tried to keep a nice open feel so we used very little compression. The only real compression we used was some vintage tape emulation tools which tended to be used on the drum tracks and also used as a send similar to parallel compression. We used four different ones over the whole project. My favorite the UAD Ampex plugin, then the UAD Studer emulation, the PSP Vintage Warmer, and finally the Waves Kramer tape. All these helped to give us a certain sound.

Bass

Bass was also recorded twice on this track. Initially we had some double bass laid down, but we felt that this part was too busy for the track and in the end settled for a really nice and well played electric bass part. The player we worked with on this was a college friend and great musician called Paul Sargeson, and again this is the only track he’s featured on. The aim was to have the bass add a really nice warmth to the track, to be set back in the mix, but be present and full of character at the same time. I feel it does its job and really firms up the low end. The trick is always getting the balance between simple and interesting. I hope we’ve achieved it. We tracked a few bass options using different microphones and DI but in the end we settled for recording using a Neumann M147 which really gives a nice tone. Mix on the bass sees a similar pattern to the drums where compression is kept to a minimum with a fair amount of EQ and some tape emulation used.

Noise

Noise is as it says… It is something that we have on every one of our tracks where we either record, take samples, or edit in different noises, whether they be crackles, background noises, or just strange sounds. We always put these in as it gives a more realistic, life-like feel, and a less clinical feel to the music. I feel it helps the track settle and sit better as a piece of music. The noise track is very simple and kept very low with just some added crackles and pops and a bit of hiss added. It’s mixed very low but it’s interesting that when you take it away from the mix the track feels more hollow and other parts feel much more exposed.

Guitar

The guitar was the last thing to go down on this track and was played by our guitar hero Jeff Parsons. The guitar was quite carefully worked out so not to interfere with the vocal melody. We had one decent practice recording before liaising with Anna about sections and guitar parts then we tracked the guitar. The idea was to keep the guitar quite old sounding and give it enough presence in the mix without interfering. I think that comes down to how Jeff played it in the end and he does understated really well when we need him to. The guitar was a really nice addition and keeps within the theme of simple but interesting. I think we used a Sennheiser MD421 on the cab and maybe even had another one or two options there which may have crept into the final mix also. Mix was kept very simple with basic effects and some light EQ. No compression was used on guitar.

Vocals

Vocals were a big job on this track and we worked on vocals constantly throughout the process almost evaluating and doing test recordings after each instrument was laid down. Anna was really involved in the whole process of this track, which is different than how we’ve worked before. Anna put forward some really great and interesting ideas and constantly evaluated and improved the strength of the vocals and melody lines. The main vocal was recorded with a 70s Sennheiser MD421 dynamic microphone which we used a few times for vocals on this project. The difference here was that every time we recorded vocals we still felt that the vocal came across a little too clean, so we decided to use some spare material that we had used in the studio for covering and acoustically treating walls and wrapping the microphone. This gave a really interesting but subtle feel to the vocals and really achieved what we wanted. The final vocal was done in one small session with backing vocals done on the same day. The vocals were treated quite a lot in mix in order to get them to sit OK against the organ and guitar, but with some tweaking, I think we got there.

Backing Vocals

The backing vocals were great fun to record as we just kept on layering and layering one on top of the other. It gave a really nice full pad effect to the backing and with some editing in the mix sounded really nice and full, especially the ones at the end. The recording was done after the main vocals using the same technique.

Overall track

Once all the parts were down and the mix was final, we had a test in trying to make it feel like and sit with the other tracks on the album. One way in which we tried to achieve this was to take stems of each part of the final mix and give it one final tweak. In this case it really helped settle the mix down and it allowed the mix to feel much more balanced as a whole. The original aim was simplicity, and we had no idea when we started that it would take so long and be so complicated to achieve.

@ImYourKid

Each week we pay homage to a select “Original Creator”—an iconic artist from days gone by whose work influences and informs today’s creators. These are artists who were innovative and revolutionary in their fields—bold visionaries and radicals, groundbreaking frontiersmen and women who inspired and informed culture as we know it today. This week: Yasunao Tone.

As a student at Chiba Japanese National University in the 50s, Yasunao Tone showed promise across his fields of study, from poetry and prose to literature. But it was a separate artistic discipline that would eventually bring him to notoriety. Today, Tone’s experiments in sound have earned him wide respect as a pioneer of avant-garde music, as well as the Golden Nica Prize from Ars Electronica in 2002. The style that he developed, one that has evolved along with the accelerating advances of music technology, began with an experimental group of Japanese music students called Group Ongaku.

Started by Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music students Shuko Mizuno and Takehisa Kosugi, by 1960 Ongaku had added four new members, including the sonically curious Tone. They conducted their experiments in sound in group jam sessions where each member would contribute sound to an improvised ensemble using instruments as well as random objects, creating an abstract dialogue. The first of these, Automatism and Object, were recorded in 1960.

1974 Composition by Ongaku founder Takehisa Kosugi

These experiments soon led Tone and several of his Ongaku collaborators to join the Fluxus movement, a global creative collective bending various genres of the arts. Tone took cues from a fellow musician in this group name John Cage. In his music, Tone began to employ the concepts of indeterminacy that Cage’s work exemplified, and with this style as his guide, Tone took sound into new directions, creating compositions of computer music in which you can sense the precursors to modern day glitch and electronic music.

Anagram For Strings (1961)

In 1972, Tone moved to New York to continue his musical exploration. As the formats and technology at the foundation of music changed, so did Tone’s approach to their manipulation. With the advent of the compact disc in the 1980s, Tone saw an opportunity to extract unusual sound from a new medium. His experiments in damaging CDs, allowing the player to read these errors and play them back, led to Tone’s celebrated 1985 album Solo For Wounded CD. While it embodied the nature of chaos also reflected in his contemporaries’ work, Tone’s music, channeling the repetitive stabs of sound generated by damaged CDs, carried with it a rhythm in composition that inspired the processed sounds in several styles of minimal electronic dance music to follow. Though Tone’s work contained none of the accessibility of the music it inspired, he continues to be a monument of sound manipulation for modern musicians.

From Solo For Wounded CD (1985)

Until January 25th at MoMA PS1 in Queens, you can catch Exhibiting Fluxus: Keeping Score in Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde, an exhibition featuring work by Yasunao Tone and his Fluxus contemporaries.

@ImYourKid

These days technology is inescapable, so you might as well immerse yourself in what it has to offer and use it to your benefit. At least, that’s the reasoning behind the work ethic of Chinese artists Wu Juehui and Shao Ding, who head up UFO Media Lab and “virtual lab” MeatMedia—two companies that work with artists and technologists to explore the social applications of technology through experimental and R&D projects.

Both Juehui and Ding have a theatre background, and they incorporate some of the tricks they learnt from that trade in their installations, building on their theatrical foundation to create works that filter the experience of technology through performance, spectacle, and architectural forms.

Whether that be site-specific work or experimental pieces like their collaboration with Vega Zaishi Wang for The Creators Project, the intergalactic fashion show Alpha Lyrae. Or Brain Station 2, which features a lightbulb affixed to a helmet that’s controlled by the wearer’s brainwaves. “The purpose was to deconstruct the usual function of things.” Juehui says of the piece in the video above. “With these projects we rediscover our conditions.”

The pair are happy to use whatever technology it takes to rediscover these conditions, as long as they can present their audience, and the uninitiated, with a fresh way of seeing the world—and art. “There is a lot of space for media art to grow.” notes Juehui, “It’s a very broad idea. It’s also necessary and meaningful to introduce it to the general public so people can recognize its vitality and freshness.”

Learn more about them in our documentary above and check out a selection of their work below.

Brain Station 2
Close your eyes to light up the bulb.

Non-ARCHITECTURE
Recontextualizing an historic building through 3D projection mapping.

USB Organs
Channeling human experience through technological tentacles.

@stewart23rd

People are constantly concerned about emotional well being of themselves and their loved ones, but what about the cities of the world? No one ever asks how they’re feeling. Creative Applications reports on a custom-made device by Mithru Vigneshwara called Aleph of Emotions which uses Twitter to gauge a city’s emotions and displays them in a visualization on the handheld device.

The user points the device in the direction of the place they’d like to survey for emotion, then clicks on it to create a visualization.

Vigneshwara explains:

Aleph of Emotions is an experimental art project that deals with emotions. The Aleph, according to the author, Jorge Luis Borges, is a point in the Universe where all other points exist. Therefore, anyone looking at the Aleph could see everything in the Universe at once. In this project, I use the Aleph as a metaphor for an archive; Aleph of Emotions refers to an archive of emotions. This archive is produced by data collected from twitter. Data is collected based on keywords that define certain emotions. The results are finally presented with an interactive object.

The camera-like interface allows users to point along a particular direction, focus to a place along that direction, and click to view a visualization of emotions in that place. The intention is to explore and find patterns in human emotions with relation to space and time.

[via Creative Applications]

@stewart23rd

Most of us are probably never going to get up into space and see the earth from above—not unless you have a spare $200,000 to give Richard Branson. So we have to make do with Carl Sagan YouTube videos and NASA animations. The animation above, Formations by Syntfarm with sound by Brian O’Reilly, let’s you pretend, for a few moments, that you’re floating god-like above the earth looking down at the cloud formations and weather patterns twisting and twirling before your eyes.

Syntfarm are a collaborative who say they like to explore “synthetic forms and spaces. These synthetic forms are created by transcoding various phenomena from natural environments.” And so with this short film they use Processing and real satellite images to create a surreal journey through the clouds.

The meditative trip begins as you look upon an earth-like swirl of atmospheric patterns before it dives in deeper and immerses you in the abstraction of this simulated landscape. Forms slowly evolve at a glacial pace, as the camera shifts its focus from the macro to the micro and you leisurely travel onwards into a murky, alien world.

Don’t expect any Felix Baumgartner-style thrills, but go HD fullscreen and you can happily zone out for a few minutes’ respite.

[via Triangulation Blog]

@stewart23rd

It’s been a long time coming, mainly since whenever you saw James Cameron’s Aliens and were wowed by Ripley kicking queen alien butt using the power loader. But, while not quite as badass as the Caterpillar P-5000 Work Loader, it goes a little way to getting there. It’s called, not very imaginatively, Power Loader and is currently being developed by a company called Activelink.

It’s a human-augmenting exoskeleton that currently allows the user to carry 30kg with one arm without breaking a sweat, and will probably be used for mundane activities in warehouses. Rather than, say, fighting an endoparasitoid extraterrestrial species (thanks, Wikipedia!) or used to turn the average person into a superhero. But give it a few years and maybe we’ll see a new TV series where people wear these and fight it out to win a new (internet connected) fridge freezer or something.

[via DigiInfo]

@stewart23rd