With the explosion of rapid fabrication, we’ve seen 3D printed jewelry of all kinds, deriving their designs from various sources. But we’ve never seen accessories quite like Joshua DeMonte’s. For his style of massive jewelry pieces, the Philadelphia designer draws inspiration from classical architecture and applies its construction directly to his work. Bracelets that resemble the Colosseum, others that spiral like grand staircases, and “scarves” that look like the entrances to opulent cathedrals are just a few examples of the cartoonishly intricate pieces of jewelry.

In the video above from Smithsonian, DeMonte describes copying building designs and augmenting their shapes to turn them into wearable jewelry. Using a MakerBot to print his concepts, he treats the design and fabrication process as a medium through which he realizes his outlandish visions.

See images of his works below.

[via Architizer]

@ImYourKid

When China’s influential newspaper Southern Weekly invited Creator Ray Lei to present at Think Plus (kind of like the Chinese version of TED Talks), Lei created a six-minute animation called Big Hands Oh Big Hands, Let It Be Bigger And Bigger (above) in lieu of a speech.

Drawn in Lei’s colorful and youthfull animation style, Big Hands follows the story of a little boy with tiny hands, a sort of ugly duckling character in a world of people with big hands whose appendages allow them to do big things. Inspired by the warm and simple animation aesthetic championed by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio in the 80s, this is another of Lei’s works that tugs at the heartstrings in every aspect, from story to animation to sound design. Lei wrote the soundtrack’s lyrics and then he and his partner Li Xingyu taught them to a group of kindergartners and recorded their rendition.

Lei worked closely with his father on this project, who created the title sequences for the last seven of Lei’s projects. Growing up watching his father hand-write typeface on books and publications as a profession, Lei now gets to incorporate the work of a traditional craftsman, lending an air of historical foundation to the end products.

Find out the roots of Ray Lei’s animation style in our profile below.

Images courtesy of Ray Lei

@CreatorsProject

The next time you comb your hair in a public restroom or aimlessly pick a stray strand off your coat while waiting for the subway, take a moment to think about the personal information you’re leaving behind. If you’ve seen enough crime shows on television, you know that hair follicles contain unique DNA sequences, from which a crafty scientist (or, increasingly, a savvy hobbyist) can glean all kinds of personal information about you. And while leaving your locks all over town isn’t necessarily as bad as, say, walking around with your Social Security number tattooed to your forehead, imagine what someone could do with that info.

In the case of artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg and her Stranger Visions project, she’s picking up stray hairs, cigarette butts, chewing gum and finger nails in public places like bus stops, restrooms, restaurants, and wherever else people might inadvertently leave traces of themselves behind, and using these samples to sequence and analyze the DNA contained within. She then uses this information to construct speculative portraits of what these anonymous shedders might look like based on their genetic profile. The project is currently on view at the Eyebeam Annual Showcase (through January 26th) and is part of an open studio presentation at The Clocktower Gallery on January 24th.

Dewey-Hagborg first conceived of the idea, which explores the dystopian future of genetic surveillance, while contemplating a stray hair caught in a crack in the wall at her therapist’s office. “I began thinking to myself, ’I wonder who would lay down on that couch when they go to therapy. The more I thought about it, the more curious I became about who this person could possibly be. As I just mulled it over, I started thinking about how I could figure out more about that person and, you know, kind of connecting that with all of the forensic shows you see on TV. The idea kind of stuck in my head.”

Though she didn’t have a background in biology or genetic research, she put together a proposal and started shopping it around to various residency and grant programs. She finally ended up as a 2012 resident at Eyebeam, where she began developing her ideas in earnest after taking several introductory crash courses in genomics that taught her the basics of analyzing sequenced DNA.

Dewey-Hagborg collects found hair samples and uses the DNA to construct her portraits.

Using facial recognition algorithms she had worked with in the past, Dewey-Hagborg started collaborating with biologists at Genspace, a community biolab in downtown Brooklyn, and began building a 3D modeling software that would reconstruct the hypothetical visages of her mystery strangers. By identifying known parts of the genetic code that are associated with specific physical traits, then using a 3D facial modeling software developed by some researchers in Basel, Dewey-Hagborg was able to construct portraits of people based on their DNA.

To date, she’s analyzed herself, the DNA of several people who have open sourced their genomes online, and five samples found in public. She’s working on sequencing additional found samples and perfecting her 3D modeling software. But what are the implications of a straight-from-the-pages-of-science-fiction project like this? We spoke to Dewey-Hagborg to find out more about her creative vision and the paranoia that drives it.

Dewey-Hagborg and her self-portrait.

The Creators Project: This type of genetic analysis was totally new for you when you began this project. Your previous work was more in the vain of…
Machine learning has been kind of my area of expertise. I’ve been working at the intersection of art and artificial intelligence for about 10 years and in lots of different media. I usually call myself an information artist because the thing that kind of connects the different things together is some interest in the abstract idea of information and information processing—kind of how humans process information, how machines process information, and what distinguishes us from each other. Most of my work in the past has dealt with that in some realm, but I think what connects all of that together is that there is a kind of criticality of the algorithm and [a criticality] about the way algorithms represent parts of nature and the way the coder gets represented in the algorithm they’re designing. That’s a big interest of mine.

So you decided to tackle the original algorithm—DNA.
Yes, exactly. It’s a cool way to do that.

What are you working towards? Are you trying to make the most accurate portrait possible? You don’t even necessarily have a way of verifying that, especially with the samples you pull from the streets. What is the goal here, if you were to identify one?
The goal definitely is just to get people to think about this. I think it’s completely fascinating that we can learn all these things about ourselves through DNA. I also think it’s really important that we remember that these are probabilities that we are dealing with. They’re not exact, it’s very probabilistic, and yet it’s starting to be used in law enforcement increasingly. It’s also becoming easier and easier for anyone to come along and grab that information, and it’s still largely unregulated and unlegislated. I think that really makes it something worth thinking about, something that’s worth having a dialogue about, as a culture.

What are the implications of it not being regulated?
For example, in law enforcement, the implication is a sample found at a crime scene: a police forensic biologist analyzes it and determines the ethnicity of this person is a certain ethnicity, and that information filters back out to the public and potentially causes harm or trouble or difficulty for someone because it may or may not be accurate. Whether or not it is, we tend to use and view science with a sense of authority. How does that compare to a witness saying they saw someone at a crime scene? We tend to give science even more authority when, in this case, it’s probably much less accurate than a witness, depending of course on the witnesses reliability.

I think what’s fascinating is that the person who designs this system, they’re like me designing my system. It’s filled with all of my biases, even though in many ways, it has a kind of objectivity. It is filled with all of these little choices that I made when I made my own characterizations of what people look like. For example, there’s a parameter of gender in the software, so you can determine on a scale of like negative five to positive five how male or female a face is. So when I categorize the faces male or female, I’m making a decision about how much of that trait to include for a person—very male, very female, somewhere in the middle, more neutral. Those are the kinds of decisions that we forget that scientists and engineers make every day.

Portraits created from open source DNA samples found on Github.

You describe this project as an investigation into “genetic surveillance.” What does that mean to you?
There is of course paranoia from media and I think a lot of it ultimately points to this question of identity and this big question mark that we all have when we try to think about who we are, what makes us, what defines us as people. DNA seems to be, scientifically, the closest thing we have to the source code for our identity. To think that it’s not as precious as we like to imagine, that we’re just discarding it at all times, throwing it around, to think that that could be cloned or that it could be used against us in some way… I think it’s a natural fear to have, and I don’t know that it is completely unknown.

I think it’s something we’re going to have to deal with in the next decade because when the $1,000 dollar genome sequencer comes out in the next year, we’ll have a USB stick and potentially I could take one of these hairs or take a couple of hairs, extract the DNA, put it on the USB stick, and within minutes have someone’s entire genome on my computer. The whole pace of this is about to just rapidly, rapidly expand and we still really see this as being science fiction.

All images courtesy of Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

@juliaxgulia

Imagine you were rendered unable to distinguish between colors, unable to tell the different between black, white, yellow, or not knowing why an orange is called an orange. It would be an unusual form of torture, but that’s what Neil Harbisson has had to live with for most of his life. Born with a condition known as achromatopsia, he is unable to see colors and is affected by complete color blindness.

But this unfortunate tale has a happy ending, as Harbission became the owner of a device created by Adam Montandon called the Eyeborg. The device is embedded in Harbission’s skull and provides a synesthetic function, translating colors into sounds. Not only does he get to experience that alchemical transformation of the senses, but he’s also got the credential of being the first ever cyborg (his passport picture includes the device).

“My body and technology have united”, Harbission says in the short film above, Cyborg Foundation by Rafel Duran Torrent, which raises questions on how our relationship to technology might change as biotech journeys from a science fiction to an everyday reality.

Technologist Amber Case, who studies our relationship with machines, already considers us low-tech cyborgs, what with our constant attachment to our devices. The question is: how will this relationship evolve as wearable tech becomes ubiquitous, and technology and our physical selves (and physical reality) become less distinguishable?

[via Vimeo]

@stewart23rd

Back in 2011 we reported on design collective Squidsoup‘s immersive light installation Scapes at London’s Tenderpixel gallery. The piece featured floating tendrils of light which reacted to sound created by Norwegian musician Alexander Rishaug. And now it seems they’ve made a new iteration of the piece with their latest work, Submergence, currently on show at the Galleri ROM in Oslo, Norway from now through February 17th.

Going for the “bigger and better” way of thinking, Submergence contains 8,064 lights and takes up a larger space than the Scapes piece. Not dissimilar visually to Muti Randolph‘s Deep Screen installation, it responds to visitors’ movements as they negotiate their way around the multicolored lightscape.

This pixelated field is created using a piece of technology called Ocean of Light, composed of a 3D grid of individually controllable LEDs which Squidsoup describe as, “Somewhere between a screen and environmental lighting.” With this customizable piece of hardware, the group can create dynamic displays in real time that react to sound and movements.

You can check out some images of the installation below.

Images: Squidsoup

[via Colossal]

@stewart23rd

How does a magical realist game about a secret highway beneath Kentucky set to an electronic and bluegrass soundtrack, sound? If it sounds like your idea of a well spent weekend locked away in your bedroom then color you excited, because this is exactly what the latest release from game developers Cardboard Computer is.

Called Kentucky Route Zero, it’s described as a point and click adventure game, but one which replaces puzzles with character development, story, and atmosphere. Looking at the trailer above, the visuals look exquisite with a cartoon/comic book style that plays with shadow and light to create lush landscapes set in rural Kentucky and a subterranean world.

In a middle digit to convention, the game isn’t coming out as one complete narrative but rather in installments. The first one was released last December and they’ll be another four acts to follow throughout this year. The soundtrack will consist of electronica by Ben Babbitt mixed with traditional hymns fromThe Bedquilt Ramblers.

The Another World-type visuals twinned with the bluegrass/electronic should make for an engrossing, mysterious, and eclectic gaming experience. One that will rely on the mood and ambience created through the sound design and graphics to immerse the viewer in its laidback dynamics.

@stewart23rd

Famous new media artist Jeremy Bailey, as he refers to himself, never does things the regular way. While most artists dealing with augmented reality prefer to maintain a bit of mystique, Bailey’s centerpiece is his ultra-optimistic personality, dressed up with virtual objects that perform a number of different roles. Most recently, we saw him with a virtual mask that shows feeds from different TV channels, which he presented with extra enthusiasm because, as he informed us in the video, he had just gotten married. Now, he returns with a Kickstarter project called Important Portraits that has more to do directly with the backers than any campaign we’ve seen to date. Here’s part of his pledge:

I want to reveal your true inner essence in your very own 21st century augmented reality portrait. As a Famous New Media Artist I have access to the latest techniques and technology, everything necessary for you to truly express yourself is at my fingertips. I’ve been making myself look amazing in augmented reality self portraits for over 10 years and I’ve decided it’s time to help others look as great as I do.

For this project, Bailey will create an augmented reality portrait for each of his donors, the most generous of which will be included in an exhibition at Pari Nadimi gallery in Toronto this April. Lower donations will get you things like an AR postcard of your portrait, an AR portrait of Bailey’s wife, and even a lock of her red hair. So, there are some tangible benefits to making this project a reality. As a backer, you can trust in Bailey to make good on his promises. Here’s some evidence of his dedication:

There is also a small risk that if the portrait of my wife Kristen sells too well and that our promise to include a lock of hair might conflict with the limitations of human hair growth. That said, we have been growing her hair in preparation, and I will be discussing with her the possibility of shaving her head to keep up with demand.

What a guy…

Donate to Bailey’s project here.

@ImYourKid

“This has really been blown out of proportion,” Omer Fast wrote in an email a few weeks ago, speaking about 5000 Feet is the Best (2011), a work which stems from his interest in military and surveillance drones. Fast is an accomplished video artist whose work has taken an increasingly political timbre in recent years. Most recently, he had been asked to describe an admittedly brief bit of homeland security intrigue in which he and his collaborators were involved.

While working on another project that would include interviews with people who had operated drones in the past, Fast was approached by the FBI and told to lay off. "After the call, our contacts went dead,” he told Photoworks magazine, “We were told to stop what we were doing and threatened in suggestive, spy-movie language.”

Fast didn’t much feel like telling me about his next project. In emails and over the phone, he seemed to assume that I was looking for the kind of shallow, get-a-load-of-this news item which, let’s face it, would probably gather more web traffic than a serious essay about his work. He’s half right. The brief mention of the FBI, and the cartoonish behavior he describes, is great for a 200-word blog post (the summary in The Art Newspaper was shorter than that).

But it’s also true that for some time, drone technology has been a regular topic in current events, and a source of concern in the public’s mind. Increasingly, it has also been a favored source of material and subject of interest among contemporary artists.

Their range of approaches is striking, and not all of it is documentarian. Although much of 5000 Feet is the Best is drawn from descriptions of veteran military drone operators, the re-enactment, (cast, rather brilliantly, with American-looking actors), was obviously meant to resemble a suburb in the southwestern United States—not in rural Pakistan. Although a big part of Fast’s thesis involves the alienated, far-away aspects of a remote-controlled military, mixing the operator’s account with the scene of a white family driving around in a station wagon does a great deal to bring the narrative closer to home.

At the same time, not all of today’s “drone art” is focussed on war zones. Writer and artist James Bridle (of New Aesthetic fame) is probably best known for his Tumblr page, Dronestagram, which consists of photographs of Afghanistan and Yemen, processed through an Instagram-style filter. Though the information is sometimes less precise than desired, Bridle confirms that each site has been the location of a drone strike through sources in the mainstream media and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, as well as activist sites including Dronewars UK. “The landscapes and the places and their names are real,” he writes on Dronestagram. “These are just images of foreign landscapes, still; yet we have got better at immediacy and intimacy online: perhaps we can be better at empathy too.”

Bridle has at the same time been lauded for his overhead photographs of sites in London, one of which includes a 1:1 silhouette of the MQ-1 Predator drone chalked out into the pavement.

A similar outline can be seen in his photograph of the space in front of a Greek Orthodox Church in Istanbul.

Images via blog.chasejarvis.com

But not all art dealing with drones involves photography. As one practitioner put it to Animal New York this past September, “I’m an artist in the medium that I choose, and the medium I choose [is] based on the message.” Alarmed by reports about the use of armed drones abroad and dissatisfied with the level of the conversation about the use of drones in the US, an artist calling himself Essam Attia spent several months planning a city-wide installation work on the subject. He and his collaborators designed a series of satirical posters, which commented on the NYPD’s speculated use of surveillance drones around the city, slipping them into the place of window ads at bus stops and on subway platforms.

“It’s all very mundane and monotonous,” he said. “I did it directly in front of some cops, and nobody even looked twice.” Eventually, however, the police did notice, and when speaking to Animal, he allowed for lighting and a voice modification that made him resemble a drag queen with an afro.

Attia denied that his work had anything to do with the Occupy demonstrators, which he called “a broken down movement,” and the interview includes no comment about whether the similarly prankish parking signs advertising an “authorized drone strike zone” were his doing. Of course, both Attia and the parking signs’ author, who was written about anonymously in The New Yorker a year ago, identified themselves as former “geospatial analysts” for the US Army. Essam Attia was arrested in late November after a vigorous investigation by the NYPD’s counterterrorism unit, who at one point were dusting the glass sleeves of bus stop ads for his fingerprints.

The most recent incidence of drone-spoofing to reach the mainstream media is the work of Adam Harvey, an artist based in New York who is known equally in the worlds of technology and contemporary art. Looking for a way to respond to the proliferation of domestic surveillance drones, Harvey developed a line of apparel called “Stealth Wear,” or clothing that is designed to shield the wearer from detection by common surveillance technologies. Debuting the line last week at London’s Primitive Gallery, the series included a sweatshirt that hides the wearer from thermal imaging, a pocket protector that can black out a phone signal, and a dashing “anti-drone burqa.”

Adam Harvey’s “Anti-Drone Burqa.” Image via PrimitiveLondon.co.uk

As the debate over the use of unmanned drones has intensified since President Obama nominated John Brennan, his chief counterterrorism advisor, as the next director of the CIA, the range of artistic responses to drone art is likely to broaden still. Last week, when the British military announced plans to begin final testing for Taranis, a stealth drone that will fly faster than the speed of sound, commenters and bloggers breathed a response with an increasingly-familiar mixture of awe and anxiety. The tension between these two emotional responses, to say nothing of the horribly tangled personal ethics and rules of war that drone technology draws, is the primary material for what can turn into some thoughtful, inventive art. It is usually a cross between, “Holy fuck, that’s cool,” and just plain, “Holy fuck.”

Back in the 1940s artist Will Eisner was experimenting with the visual forms of sequential art in his The Spirit comic book strip—playing around with convention and venturing outside the static panels, as characters and sounds spilled out onto the page.

Fast forward over 70 years and director Edson Oda has created a comic book stop motion that uses the panel-structure as a springboard for experimentation. Instead of a nine-paneled layout, the story is told by layering cut out panels on top of each other to progress the narrative. It’s an ingenious idea that allows Oda to play around with the format, incorporating ideas like submerging the paper in red liquid to show blood, or even dousing it with lighter fluid and setting it on fire to add a bit of drama.

The short film above, called Malaria, follows a story centered around a hired killer whose task is to take down Death himself. What could’ve been a standard comic book affair is given added dynamism by the combination of various techniques, which include ‘origami, kirigami, nankin illustration, comic books and Western cinema.’

You can check out a previous version of this mashing up of styles and techniques in Oda’s The Writer, below.

[via io9]

@stewart23rd

If you’re familiar with the work of filmmaking collective Factory Fifteen, then you’ll know they have an exceptional talent for making stunning, and surreal, computer generated visuals. From their speculative architectural musings to post-apocalyptic scenarios brought about by nuke-powered molluscs, their films have a captivating style that always packs a visual slap.

Their latest effort is Jonah directed by Kibwe Tavares—one of the collective and director of Robots of Brixton—for which the trailer’s recently been released. Tavares describes the film as a “Live action/animation mash up, almost like a collage, the CGI is photo real but how we use it becomes increasing magical as we progress through the film.”

The film is set in Zanzibar and looks at the effects tourism can have on a country from an economic and environmental perspective. These themes are explored through the narrative of a friendship between two guys and “the world’s biggest jumping fish.” The trailer teases a little of the detailed and richly realised CGI, and you can see more of how intricate the visuals will be from the images below.

Trailer for Jonah

The lush underwater world of the fish is contrasted with the built-up town above, which is full of flashing lights and jumbled architecture stacked up together. This aesthetic, Tavares says, came from the team looking at the bustling commercial landscapes of places like Khaosan Road in Bangkok, Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, and Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo. Along with taking inspiration from film and TV, like the meticulous scenery of anime Tekkonkinkreet and the realistic, award-winning CGI in Boardwalk Empire.

Coming from an architectural background, architecture always plays an important role in the films of Factory Fifteen and for Jonah Tavares says, “The architecture is folded into the narrative as well as the production design. The image of the fish is what becomes famous, this becomes replicated in billboards, posters, physical signs and buildings—it’s all very ”http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/learning-las-vegas" target="_blank">Learning From Las Vegas."

The short film premiered at Sundance and will be released later in the year.

@stewart23rd

Conducting an orchestra of scientists and musicians to broadcast music into the cosmos might sound like an idea you’d come up with late at night after one too many whiskeys, but artist and designer Nelly Ben Hayoun made it happen. Gathering together a diverse group of people—astronaut Yvonne Cagle on percussion, Bruce Sterling, Japanese art band Maywa Denki, and many more—the event took place last September at the NASA Ames Research Center.

As well as sending music into space Hayoun also made a film of the event, a teaser of which has just been released online (above). The film goes behind-the-scenes of the International Space Orchestra, a project that merges music and science and shows that just because you’re a Capsule Communicator, doesn’t mean you can’t play a mean triangle.

To find out more about the project read our interview with Nelly Ben Hayoun where she talks about how the idea came about.

@stewart23rd

With over 1 million apps in Apple’s app store, it’s become increasingly hard for developers to stand out. So, much like their big-budget console counterparts, independent app creators are taking on the task of making their own game trailers.

This teaser (above) for Wide Sky by designer, animator and iPhone programmer, Marcus Eckhert might be one of the most eye-popping to date. In the video, we see a warmly lit and expertly textured 3D world juxtaposed with the more mid-century illustrated look of the game. The attention to detail in both the trailer and game are impressive: geometric explosions, gliding and sliding stats, deco typography.

Photo: Marcus Eckhert

In the game, you play a bubbly hedgehog who must climb through the sky to destroy orbs and collect the broken pieces. It’s like Tarzan meets Sonic meets the UPA. Though the game mechanics are admittedly tough to master, Eckhert poured a lot of animation love into the intro tutorials that guide you through the story and rules.

Photo: Marcus Eckhert

While Eckhert’s background is in animation, making a game was something of a childhood dream for him. “I was always a little disappointed that I had never done anything in the direction. And then smartphones came along, apps came along, and then I was a motion design freelancer who could use some time off.”

Wide Sky was Eckhert’s excuse to learn to code and learn game design. “I started reading up on coding in the summer of 2011, usually a couple hours at night, but I only started working full-time on the game in December of 2011. I never planned for the game to take so… long, but I kept improving and suddenly wasn’t satisfied with what I had.”

The trailer was made concurrent to the game over the course of about two months. “I thought, if the game bombs, I’d still have a (hopefully) nice looking video,” Eckhert wrote us in an email. The trailer was a way for him to hedge his bets on the success of the game and push his abilities in the photorealistic realm of 3D.

Whether or not Eckhert will choose to be a full time game developer instead of an animator is still up in the air. For now, he’s committed to iterating and improving on Wide Sky. “It’s nice to have created the illusion of having mastered anything but I just really go through and edit my work over and over again,” he said. “After some time, you figure out shortcuts, but then your standards also improve and I guess you improve with your standards.”

Photo: Marcus Eckhert

Photo: Marcus Eckhert

@gorociao

On the blog this week we got a glimpse of Iris van Herpen’s latest fashion collection, checked out U-Ram Choe’s new artwork, introduced episode 4 of our Kill Screen series, and took a look inside artist Phillip Stearns’ studio. We also found out how you can catch a thief using a pinhole camera, enjoyed Ray Lei’s latest animation, and spoke with an artist who collects strangers’ DNA and makes portraits from them.

On the web…

· There’s an exhibition in London dedicated to Lolcats.

·Cinematic scenes seen through Google Street View (above).

·Browser bookmarklet lets you turn online videos into slitscan weirdness.

· 3D print your own animatronic robot.

@stewart23rd

Before recorded formats, musical pieces were unbound by time limitations. It wasn’t until the capacity of various formats began restricting how much music could fit onto them that the concept of individual tracks comprising entire albums emerged. But now that physical formats have all but diminished, there’s no reason we need to adhere to the limitations of time. Carsten Nicolai’s new project takes full advantage of this idea.

Along with percussionist Rainer Römer of Ensemble Modern, Nicolai developed the performance piece Aleph-1, named for a Hewbrew-rooted mathematical term used to represent infinite sets. Fitting their title, the musical pieces in aleph-1 are infinite, in that they have no defined beginning or end.

Nicolai first release the Aleph-1 project in 2008, exploring the use of melody, which was uncommon on his previous releases. This performance features Nicolai himself on the electronics, Römer on marimba, with Norbert Ommer action as sound director.

If you’re in Frankfurt this weekend, check out the show this Sunday at Portikus

To experience more of Carsten Nicolai’s creations, check out our profile on him below.

@ImYourKid

When we last heard from the group of independent developers and designers behind the wearable technology brand MACHINA, we got a mere sneak peek at their MIDI jacket, a garment outfitted with various sensors that allow you to control and manipulate sound via software. Now with a Kickstarter campaign in progress, MACHINA’s Wearable Machines Project is well underway may soon enter the phase of mass producting the world’s first wearable MIDI controller.

By incorporating a number of sensors and buttons into the design and making the code freely available, the MIDI Jacket v01 allows fashion-forward hackers to mess with the presets and configure their own programs, ultimately taking the functionality of the jacket beyond standard control.

With the Kickstarter campaign, the team hopes to raise the funds for beta testing as well as manufacture their final prototype on a large-scale. The campaign also hopes to get the funding necessary to create a mobile app for iOS and Android that allows users to control the jacket’s functionality in a simpler way.

In addition to getting a great price on the first run of MIDI Jackets, backers can also receive a number of MACHINA’s other clever clothing designs as well as a poster of Obama riding a mechanical T-Rex. So, even if you’re not into the idea of controlling music with your body, there’s an item with universal appeal up for grabs.

Donate to The Wearable Machine Project here.

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.

Aphex Twin: “Come To Daddy” (Little Lord Faulteroy Mix)

Little Lord Faulteroy transformed the fast-paced, beatastic sound of Aphex Twin into a drum and bass lullaby filled with whispers that seem to spurt from otherworldly creatures. It’s pretty much amazing and it will totally haunt your dreams.

Nosaj Thing: “Try” (feat. Toro Y Moi)

Nosaj Thing’s latest work is a heavy dose of Baroque, electronic compositions charged with a spectrum of dark and ecstatic feelings. “Try” showcases the chill, melodic vocals of Chazwick Bundick a.k.a. Toro Y Moi, creating a seductive vibe with R&B undertones.

Falty DL: “She Sleeps” (Gang Gang Dance)

A journey through the center of the earth, reloaded. It even becomes a journey through the center of the mind, asking questions like, “For those of us who love to listen, can you once again say something about the unsayable?” Beware, it’s possible you’ll never again be able to enjoy all those garage punk and indie bands you previously loved after listening to this. Music-existentialism crisis of the week.

CREATORBONUSVIDEO

Divine Fits: “My Love Is Real”

This season Telfar Clemens, the designer behind NY-based fashion label TELFAR, is crowdsourcing his F/W 2013 collection Quilted Comfort. The (currently) all-white cotton, denim, and flannel collection was on view at New York Gallery earlier this month, displayed on custom-made sculptures made by Clemens’ friends and frequent collaborators Lizzie Fitch and Nick Rodrigues.

Visitors could see the collection up close and personal, and could also play an interactive video game TELFAR Style, designed by Alan Schaffer, which allows you to style the collection by dragging the clothes onto a virtual model, and clicking the items to change their colors. The game is also hosted online over at DIS Magazine, so head over there now, because on January 31st Clemens will select and dye his favorite looks and show the results during his New York Fashion Week presentation in February.

The collection itself is foreseeably utilitarian, multifunctional, and even though the line is technically “menswear” his collections are always unisex enough to be worn by women too (see S/S 2013). There’s a plethora of drawstring, quilted, and layerable pieces, which lend themselves very nicely to thousands of different looks. Like previous seasons, there’s various interpretations of the cargo pant, which is an awesomely gross kind of fashion… kind of like how simultaneously awesome and embarrassing wearing tube socks with spiky-bottomed Adidas flip-flops is.

In addition to being a creative way to engage and involve potential customers with the new line, Schaffer’s game is incredibly well-designed. The platform allows you to hang the clothes on the racks alongside the models, and you can even click to delegate which item of clothing hangs where on the body… meaning, you can decide if the quilted vest should be tucked into or hang out over the matching bottoms.

The one tiny fault I see is that you can only change the color of the item while it’s on the model—it defaults back to white once you move it off the mannequin and onto the rack or back down to the ground. Regardless, props to Clemens for turning this collection into both a game and a performance piece.

Take a look at some of our favorite looks below, and don’t forget to submit yours by the 31st!

[via DIS]

@kfloodwarning

For someone with the animating talents of Cyriak, it was only natural he would move into music videos. His previous video for Flying Lotus featured robots eating robots until they become one big, lumbering robot worm.

And his latest visual mindwash is for Bonobo‘s track “Cirrus”, featuring 1960s public information film footage that loops along with Bonobo’s sounds, building into a surreal crescendo of cascading imagery.

The film’s partly inspired by Zbigniew Rybczynski’s Tango (at least, this is what Cyriak points out in a YouTube comment). Rybczynski won the Oscar for Best Animated Short for his film in 1982 which shows 36 people interacting in a room, looped over and over. Made in the pre-digital era it took Rybczynski seven months to make using 16,000 cell-mattes. You can watch it below.

In Cyriak’s homage he adds his own tropes and stylistic touches to some looped footage—like surreal structures, Escherian repetitive visuals, and spiraling machinations built from elements of the video.

@stewart23rd

A chainsaw-wielding industrial robot arm might be an unusual way to demonstrate modern design practices, but that’s what featured in the exhibition 7xStool by Tom Pawlofsky and Tibor Weissmahr.

The piece demonstrated how a KUKA industrial robot can carve a stool and table in around 30 minutes from one piece of wood. Sure, it hasn’t quite got the delicate artistry of an exquisitely carved piece of furniture by a human hand, but for such an imposing piece of kit it’s pretty nimble and precise—so you’ll forgive the rough edges. After the robot showed off its carving abilities at the Passagen 2013 – Interior Design Week in Cologne, audience members could purchase the products.

It’s an impressive display of how industrialized design processes can produce precision carving with minimal wastage, and you can’t deny its machine-skill at taking a hunk of tree and turning it into some furniture.

[via Design Playgrounds]

@stewart23rd

Back in 2011 Björk’s Biophilia album caused a bit of a stir. As an album it was a multifaceted affair, taking the form of a standard album, a multimedia app that explored the relationship between art and science, a series of global live performances with custom instruments, and an educational program that took up residence in New York among other places.

Full of experimentation, the app showcased a unique world of interlinking stories, animations, and games that explored the themes in Björk’s songs—giving the user a chance to explore the cosmic landscapes conjured up by the album.

The latest development in the album’s journey is a Kickstarter project which wants to bring the app to the Android and Windows 8 operating systems. The project will support the Biophilia Educational Program through the apps and through an open-source curriculum guide for Biophilia Educators, who use the app to teach kids about music and science using a format they’re responsive to.

Here’s what Björk says on the Kickstarter page:

the biophilia educational program is a new way to teach children about science and music . it has met with success in many cities , sparking interest from kids and educators all over the world , from south america to east asia to africa . the most interest has come from students from low-income households and schools with underfunded art budgets , and the only way to bring the project to those people is to have biophilia reprogrammed for android and windows 8 . the biophilia educational project is strictly non-profit and volunteer-based , and that’s why we need your help .

warmth

björk

To find out more about the app, you can read our interviews with some of the people behind it. These include: Max Weisel, Nicola Dibben, Stephen Malinowski, Drew Berry, and Scott Snibbe who you can find out more about in our documentary below.

@stewart23rd