Short synopsis: The non-verbal documentary ROBOT WORLD depicts the evolution of robots from a mechanical somnambulist to an autonomous sensorium. The neoclassical violinist Matt Howden emphasizes the film’s message: these artificial people are our alternate doubles.
About the film: ROBOT WORLD is a compilation. The source material for this one-hour film comes from robot laboratories at universities, from private footage at industrial fairs, military archives and corporate videos from the robot industry. Motion pictures of old 16 mm films from the 1930’s were added. This non-verbal documentary was recycled from far in excess of one hundred hours of raw material. ROBOT WORLD is the second film in the “Technology & Mind & Evolution” series of Munich filmmaker Martin Hans Schmitt. The first film in this series, HIGHWAY WORLD, deals with highway worlds and in 2008/2009 was successful at international film festivals.
Robot World – A Meeting with Your Alternate Double will be screened at Robots and Avatars
They say: “The Instant Favelas Project means the constant research and dialog between disciplines and Art. We base the project in our own exploration and concerns. Those confluences create, and this provoked the first pilot project (Piloto Kamikaze) where we explored interdisciplinary/ multidisciplinary elements such as urbanity, culture, esthetic, music, environment, etc.
Instant Favelas creates a nomad city in open spaces of Zürich. These cities develop during one, two, or three weeks, and are normally built with free-hand collaborators-Favelanders. Our mobility or nomadism plays as much with external and natural factors as with the urban rules of the city where we play.
Inside of our Restless Doubts we attempt to achieve that the viewer’s role will be active, not merely looking at the process of construction, but also asking oneself, What is going on? Why here? Why this? Is it safe? What does it cost? What does it say? And of course, Is this Art? Hopefully we will arrive at the point where the viewer translates himself into a Favelander — free-hand – mind collaborator, who will perhaps create further interventions…
Instant Favelas as an open Art-Lab Experiment collaborated with interventions inside of our constructive structure. While building and networking our city-within-a-city, we try to understand cities. Our simulation becomes a laboratory where we invite other people to make an intervention—in the sense of a collaborative response to our project—so that we can reflect together about different aspects, such as space, economy, society, demography, spirituality and so on, that shape and define a city.”
Masaki Batoh, former musician of the band Ghost and currently also an acupuncturist, recently released the album called Brain Pulse Music. Here, he experimented with his BPM Machine and used traditional Japanese ritual melodies and instrumentation to form a prayer/requiem for the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Fortunately, I read some of his wise insights thanks to Co.Design
“We survivors were mentally shattered like our dead victims.” He explains to Co.Design
Batoh wanted to articulate that devastation, but the worst experiences can be tough to articulate. Talking can require that you catalog each emotion, and how do you do that when your whole psyche is a mess? How do you share the truth of what you feel, if you have no idea what that truth is?
“Human beings lie, but their brain waves never lie,” writes Batoh. And with that mantra in mind, Batoh moved beyond words. He turned to a modified EEG, what he calls a Brain Pulse Machine, to measure the brain waves of earthquake victims and play them back as music. He then mixed these tracks with his own to create Brain Pulse Music, a memorial album to raise money for Japan’s orphans.
To get Masaki Batoh’s $699.99 Brain Pulse Music Machine go to Drag City.
Hear audio samples HERE
“We believe technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.
A team within our Google[x] group started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.”
Gijs Gieskes is a sonic artist/craftsman/circuit-bender/electrician/digi-magician/industrial designer/educator among other things. As you travel through his website, you will find how wonderfully generous and transparent he is about his process and work. Bellow you will find some audio visual samples of his work.
Acid-Machine
Analog Hard Disk 2
Cappuccino Synth
Image Scan Sequencer
Test_Lab: Audio_Objects (2007); Photo by Jan Sprij
The epic story of radical Earthship eco architect Michael Reynolds, and his fight to build off-the-grid self-sufficient communities. If you haven’t seen it, here is the full length documentary.
Michael Reynolds, the “Garbage Warrior”, is an architect based in New Mexico and a proponent of “radically sustainable living.” He has been a forceful and controversial critic of the profession of architecture for its failure to deal with the amount of waste that building design creates. After graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 1969, Reynolds began his provocative work almost immediately. His thesis was published in Architectural Record in 1971 and the following year he built his first house from recycled materials. The structures built under his direction utilize everyday trash items like aluminum cans and plastic bottles. Instead of using conventional (and energy-consuming) recycling methods, however, Reynolds takes the discarded item and uses it as-is. His Thumb House, built in 1972, used beer cans wired together into “bricks,” which were mortared together and then plastered over. (The brick design was awarded a U.S. patent in 1973.) Reynolds calls this practice “Earthship Biotecture” and has dedicated his career to it. He cites as an epiphany the moment when he realized that any object, be it a pop bottle or an old tire, could become powerful and durable insulation when it was filled with dirt. He has written five books on the subject. Soon he was building and selling his experimental homes while continuing to use trial and error to improve them. The “Earthships” over time incorporated features designed to make them comfortable to live in while existing off the grid. Solar panels and geothermal cooling were added. The homes caught the imagination of celebrities and environmental activists. Actors Dennis Weaver and Keith Carradine each commissioned Reynolds to build high-end Earthships for them.
Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualizing intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology.
Essays by Raqs Media Collective, Marcel van de Drift, Dr Stephen Boyd Davis, Rob van
Kranenburg, Sophie Hope and Dr Tom Stafford.
Designers are increasingly faced with the problem of understanding and visualizing data-filled space and making it inhabitable. In their book Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who conduct research in the field at the Royal College of Arts, speak of the electro-climate and the electro-geography – which can effect architecture just as the real climate can – and refer to it as »hertzian space.« The two designers think of electromagnetic fields full of data. But in times of geospatial data and location-based services data also assumes this wave field-like materiality. Are screens an appropriate medium for this? What is the form of these metadata?
Now that location-based metadata waft through the space, thereby redefining contexts and places, a new field opens up to designers: How will information be usefully integrated into the physical space? Inspired by the fictional illustrations by Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas, who interprets the spatial expansion of radio waves, we attempted to lend metadata a form. Using the light painting technique, we placed our idea of these data in a room, making it haptic. The resulting forms depict possible data sets and examine the design possibilities between technoid holograms and personal notes.
Google Maps is now available for 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment Systems (NES). Availability in Google Store is TBD but you can try it on your browser by going to http://maps.google.com and clicking “Quest” in the upper right hand corner of the map.
Produced by Ollie Palmer, the Ant Ballet is a 2-year investigation into the parallels between human and ant communication which culminated in the world’s first ballet to exclusively feature ants. It is currently in Phase I of IV.
Using synthesized pheromones (Z9:16Ald Hexadecanol) and highly invasive Linepthinema humile Argentine ants, a robotic arm lays pheromone powder trails that cause the ants to behave in a different way to their usual foraging. Performances in late 2012 will feature mass colony movement testing, and the first intercontinental ant ballet.
The machine is part of a larger study of paranoia, control systems, insects and architecture.
The Ant Ballet will be installed in ZSL London Zoo’s BUGS zone with simulated ants until June 2012, and at FutureEverything festival in Manchester from the 16th – 19th May. The first live Ant Ballet performance will take place as part of Pestival in Sao Paulo later in the year.
Pestival aims to initiate a cultural shift in the way people think, moving them towards a more integrated way of looking at the natural world. Pestival’s lasting legacy is to forge new working relationships between disciplines, communities and species. Pestival says “Insectes Sans Frontières”.
Pestival believes insects are critical to human life on Earth. With over a million insect species, they are the most diverse group of animals on Earth. And yet insects are frequently misunderstood, reviled or, at best, ignored by the majority of the human population.
Pestival has set out to challenge existing stereotypes about insects and to give them their rightful place, for good and bad (vectors and pollinators), in our collective cultural consciousness.
Agnes Meyer Brandis’ poetic-scientific investigations weave fact, imagination, storytelling and myth, past, present and future. In “THE MOON GOOSE ANALOGUE: Lunar Migration Bird Facility (MGA)” the artist develops a narrative based on Godwin’s The Man in the Moone, in which the protagonist flies to the Moon in a chariot towed by ‘moon geese’. Meyer-Brandis has actualized this concept by raising eleven moon geese with astronauts’ names and imprinting them on herself as goose-mother. They live in a remote Moon analogue operated from a control room within the gallery.
This is the documentation of the project and installation:
THE MOON GOOSE ANALOGUE :
Lunar Migration Bird Facility
The project consists of 3 main elements:
1. The Moon Goose Colony (MGC)
Raising and imprinting eleven moon geese in Italy, ongoing
2. The Moon Analogue
a living space for geese, not-public installation in Italy
3. The Control Room
an installation in a public exhibition space
For further information please have a look at: ffur.de/mga
THE MOON GOOSE ANALOGUE: Lunar Migration Bird Facility
was commissioned by The Arts Catalyst and FACT Liverpool.
In partnership with: Pollinaria
“Ouija knows all the answers. Weird and mysterious. Surpasses, in its unique results, mind reading, clairvoyance and second sight. It furnishes never failing amusement and recreation for the entire family. As unexplainable as Hindu magic—more intense and absorbingly interesting than a mystery story. Ouija gives you entertainment you have never experienced. It draws the two people using it into close companionship and weaves about them a feeling of mysterious isolation. Unquestionably the most fascinating entertainment for modern people and modern life.”
With these words, William Fuld (businessman, designer, toy maker, with no branch factories or offices) invites you, the American people, to enter the strange, twilight world of Ouija, the Wonderful Talking Board.
Silenc is a tangible visualization of an interpretation of silent letters within Danish, English and French.
How much of a language is silent? What does it look like when you take the silence out? Can we use code as a tool to answer these questions?
One of the hardest parts about language learning is pronunciation; the less phonetic the alphabet, the harder it is to correctly say the words. A common peculiarity amongst many Western languages is the silent letter. A silent letter is a letter that appears in a particular word, but does not correspond to any sound in the word’s pronunciation.
A selection of works by Hans Christian Andersen is used as a common denominator for these “translations”. All silent letters are set in red text. When viewed with a red light filter, these letters disappear, leaving only the pronounced text.
Elevated land-based islands could protect people living in low-lying areas from tsunamis – and archipelagos of them could form entire towns.
LIKE giant spacecraft that have just touched down, they give the countryside an otherworldly look.
Elevated land-based islands are what one architect is proposing for the Tōhoku region of north-east Japan, the area that was devastated by last March’s magnitude 9 earthquake and the mega-tsunamis it triggered.
Keiichiro Sako of Sako Architects in Tokyo has created a blueprint in which groups of these islands form entire towns. They are designed to protect people living in low-lying areas from future tsunamis.
Tōhoku Sky Village is not just an architect’s flight of fancy: one municipality in the affected region is making moves towards building one in its locality and others could follow.
Most islands will be used for residential purposes, with between 100 and 500 houses and apartments. Fuel stations, waste disposal and storage facilities, and car parks are on lower floors. Commercial islands, meanwhile, will house factories and processing facilities for industries such as fisheries and agriculture. As well as lifting residents high above the destructive power of the waves, the design comes with a number of safety features. A reinforced gate at the back of each island automatically closes after a tsunami warning, while steps up the sides let people climb to safety.
German interdisciplinary practice Raumlaborberlin has completed’ Officina Rome’, a villa constructed entirely out of recycled materials on the grounds of MAXXI in Rome, italy. conceived for the museum’s ‘RE-cycle: strategies for architecture, city, and planet’ exhibition currently running until 29 April 2012, the free-standing structure incorporates trash-like materials such as old bottles, oil barrels, wooden window frames, and used car doors.
The Man Who Made Things Fly – Avios (official version). The making of the new Avios advert. See a washing machine, lawnmower, BBQ, and petrol pump fly with the help of Avios, the new name for Airmiles.
Pulling together decades of data from the Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, and New Horizon probes, as well as the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists at the US Geological Survey have put together a complete geological map of Io, the beautiful, mysterious Jovian moon. Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system, and its surface reflects that: unlike everything else around, it has no craters, a sign that its surface is constantly being remade. That’s thanks to volcanoes that shoot out more than 100 times more lava per year than Earth’s.
Each Clamp Pendant is made in Lindsey Adelman’s Manhattan studio from parts made with local suppliers and artisans. Each globe is one-of-a-kind and hand-blown.
Department 21 is a project where designers, artists and architects can meet, collaborate and share working space beyond the institutional boundaries of their own disciplines.
Department 21 was set up in 2009 when a group of students at the Royal College of Art, London initiated an experimental cross-departmental studio space, thereby engendering new discussions and ways of working than had been seen in recent years at the college.
Emerging from an institutional context in which individual authorship and outcome-driven projects are the dominant frames for creative production, the project is the result of a need for new, collaborative forms of exchange between students from different disciplines: it is a means to get in touch with other peoples’ practices (and in this way question one’s own practice), as well as being a platform to support collaboration beyond specialties.
The philosophy driving Department 21 is an emancipated vision of postgraduate studentship, where all those entering a space of education have the responsibility to take a position regarding their learning process. Contrary to the commonly found format of short interdisciplinary collaboration with a secure outcome, Department 21 feels it necessary to create premises for individuals to encounter the others’ spontaneous collaborative working methods based on common interests, curiosity and critical dialogue. The ongoing research work of the project is therefore to identify, test and refine methodologies that enable this type of encounter to emerge and thrive.
Designing Economic Cultures is a research project by design duo Brave New Alps that sets out to investigate the relationship between socio-economic precarity and the production of socially and politically engaged design projects.
The fundamental question that the project poses at its outset is: how can designers, who through their work want to question and challenge the prevalent capitalist system, its organisational forms and its problematic consequences, gain a satisfying degree of social and economic security without having to submit themselves to the commercial pressures of the market?
In other words, how can designers, who have a critically engaged practice, keep on developing this practice without selling themselves off or being crushed by the market? Designing Economic Cultures is an attempt to articulate, develop and share a wide range of tactics and structures that allow designers to produce work that contributes to the development of a more autonomous, democratic and heterogeneous society.
When I began watching this video I didn’t notice that my computer volume was all the way down (thanks to my immediate reaction to a terrible jingle from a previous video.) When I brought back the volume, and therefore the video’s audio, at its 00:25 I saw something that made me think: Yes! We finally cellphones that self destroy by some chemical process! Then (in a microsecond), I started speculating about the components of this new fascinating technology and if it was harmless to the environment. Unfortunately, I was wrong. The Micro Arc Oxidation process will create an extremely durable, premium finish for HTC One S. Sad Face.
They say: Originally designed for use on satellites and race cars, the process starts with aircraft aluminum. Ten thousand volts of electricity hit the metal, almost like lighting strikes, causing a microscopic transformation which creates a super-strong ceramic case that is five times stronger than aerospace aluminum.
We say: We want the self-destructive biodegradable technology!
In October, when an Australian metal-recycling company purchased two deep-water berths in Providence, R.I., Mayor Angel Taveras hailed it as “a major accomplishment in the city’s efforts to revitalize its waterfront industries.”
Five months later, locals are unhappy about the “eyesore” their new neighbor has created: a 50,000-ton hill of steel. “Where did the scrap metal pile come from?” asked a Providence TV station.
It’s the epilogue to a battle that’s been raging in Providence for several years — on one side, a developer who wanted to turn the shoreline into apartments, offices and hotels. On the other, the maritime industries that have been working there since the turn of last century. In the end, industry won, but the complaints that followed — who put this big, ugly heap of metal on our lovely industrial port? — say something about our attitude toward working waterfronts.
“I think the average person likes the idea of a working waterfront,” says Jordan Royer of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association in Seattle, a shipping industry trade association. We picture barnacled vessels from foreign ports, distant foghorns, a bad-ass Marlon Brando strolling cobblestone streets — not 20-story gantry cranes and deafening machinery running ’round the clock. “Our tank barges have to test their alarm systems every time they go out,” says Robert Hughes, vice president of Hughes Bros. marine company in New Jersey, “and they go out according to the tides and the currents.”
Image above: The Port Newark Container Terminal near New York City in Newark (Credit: Reuters)
The Digit is a giant chrome double-finger that looms over unwitting passers-by in Union Square, NYC. More precisely, it is a double-sided finger, with a second appendage extending out of where the rest of the hand would be. The two fingertips methodically double-tap and swipe, while reflecting the surrounding architecture on their bulbous surface.
The Digit is a virtual (augmented-reality) sculpture that can be viewed with an iPhone application available for free at the App Store. Simply launch the app when you are on the southern tip of Union Square and look up through the iPhone’s camera.
The sculpture is a response to two public art works located in Union Square – the statue of George Washington (one of the first public sculptures in New York) and Metronome – a recent installation about time that occupies 3 building facades just south of the square. Incidentally, Metronome includes an enlarged replica of GW statue’s hand (located just above the smoking hole). The Digit follows this trajectory by isolating the index digit of George Washington and appropriating it as an emblem of the digital condition.
The Digitalso exist as an interactive web experience and in the form of physical souvenirs. WebGL compatible Browser Required (Firefox 4 or Chrome 9 and up) or you may need to update your graphics card driver.
Now family, lawyers and police at the new Justiz Vollzugs Anstalt (Prison/ Correctional institution) in Düsseldorf, can have a more vibrant sensory experience as they walk this tunnel to meet the inmates. Hopefully, these colors have a positive effect on all the visitors’ psyche so they can transmit it to the prison inhabitant. Artist Markus Linnenbrink was commissioned by Justiz Vollzugs Anstalt.
AIRE is a mask that converts wind energy (provided by the wearer’s breath) into electricity for the recharging of small electronic devices.
The consumerist tendencies of today’s industrialized society make the use of gadgets increasingly common, either by necessity or hobby. Though many of our gadgets offer benefits, they tend to consume a high amount of electrical energy. This may cause problems for the environment, especially if the energy used by these devices is derived from non-renewable sources.
The use of renewable energy sources is the most important step we can take for the minimization of environmental damage. Harnessing energy from human activities and transforming it into electrical energy is possible, and is a great solution to such energy issues.
AIRE offers a way to do this. It is an electronic mask capable of converting the wind energy provided by the wearer’s breath into electrical energy. Inside the unit there are small wind turbines that make the conversion and the energy is transferred through a cable to one’s small electronic device.
AIRE can be used in any situation, indoors or outdoors. It can be used while you sleep, walk, run, or read a book, for example. Besides saving energy (and contributing to environmental preservation), it also encourages the practice of physical exercise. Its energy is available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Oorwonde is an interactive operating table whereby the visitor turns himself over to aural surgery and hears and feels the soundtrack of a fictitious operation. Based on Bernhard Leitner’s philosophy that listening is understood to extend to all parts of the body and sound to touch a deep nerve, Oorwonde explores the concept of bodily hearing and the borders of the audible. Oorwonde wants to take the visitor by surprise via the sensation of sounds and movements and the insight that these sound and movements can be influenced by the amount of pressure executed on specific points.
Hailing from the 1980s, the technology isn’t exactly new, but it has been making inroads lately in both art and engineering, being used to manufacture prosthetic limbs, car parts, furniture, and jewelry. It’s also subject of “Print/3D,” an exhibition of objects at New York’s Material ConneXion that opened this week. “3-D Printing breaks away barriers in design that are challenged by the constraints of standard manufacturing or manual production,” show curator Susan Towers told ARTINFO. While the process still has some definite kinks to be worked out, it’s already being put to revolutionary use.
Excerpt from an article written by Janelle Zara on ArtInfo
Test_Lab: Audio_Objects (2007); Photo by Jan Sprij 
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