Archive for the ‘Videos’ Category
Crochet Portraits by Jo Hamilton
May 27, 2012
Jason Freeman – Composition, Imagination and Collaboration
May 23, 2012Jason Freeman is an Associate Professor of Music in the College of Architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Center for PostNatural History – Outreach Program
May 23, 2012
The Center for PostNatural History is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge relating to the complex interplay between culture, nature and biotechnology. The PostNatural refers to living organisms that have been altered through processes such as selective breeding or genetic engineering. The mission of the Center for PostNatural History is to acquire, interpret and provide access to a collection of living, preserved and documented organisms of postnatural origin.
The Center for PostNatural History addresses this goal through three primary initiatives:
The maintenance of a unique catalog of living, preserved and documented specimens of postnatural origin.
The production of traveling exhibitions that address the PostNatural through thematic and regional perspectives.
The establishment of a permanent exhibition and research facility for PostNatural studies.
Text via The Center for PostNatural History
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72 Hour Urban Action
May 23, 2012
72 Hour Urban Action is the world’s first real-time architecture competition, where 10 international teams have 3 days and 3 nights to design and build projects in public space in response to local needs.
The teams design, build, sleep and party on site to generate interventions in public space within an extreme deadline, a tight budget and limited space. 72 Hour Urban Action invites professionals and residents to become active agents of change, from the bottom-up, and to leave a lasting impact on the urban landscape.
WHAT IS URBAN ACTION?
72 Hour Urban Action is an upcoming voice in the global movement of participatory tactical urbanism, or as we like to call it, Urban Action.
Urban Action is a civic design practice that involves residents, decision makers and professionals. It harnesses creative thinking and existing resources within a community to rapidly make places. Through the power of temporality and experimentation, it encourages participation and a lasting change of perception. Through an extreme deadline, a tight budget and limited space, Urban Action sets the imagination free to allow for new possibilities and players in public space.
In July 2012, 72 Hour Urban Action is coming to Stuttgart to work together with local cultural activists. The world’s 1st real-time architecture competition will be the kick-off of a series of major urban interventions. All around the site of the largest urban redevelopment in Europe – Stuttgart 21 – the center of a 30 year heated public debate.
Text via 72 HOUR URBAN ACTION
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Jeannette Ginslov: Capturing Affect With a Handful of Techne
May 19, 2012On May 14, Jeannette Ginslov gave a Medea Talk about the developmental stages of the AffeXity project, the interdependence of the collaborators, the relational and dynamic formation of technical and human intervention, the encounters of the carnal and the digital, the dialogic and temporal scaffolding of encounters of techne and the hands that attempt to capture affect.
JEANNETTE GINSLOV is Medea’s artist-in-residence this spring. Her roots are as performer, choreographer and artistic director in South Africa, but for the last five years she has focused more on interdisciplinary platforms investigating the crossover between the media/dance/cinema/video and the internet.
Her work centers around affect, haptic and digital materiality on several platforms: stage, screens, online and new media applications. Ginslov is currently working with Prof Susan Kozel at Medea on the project AffeXity that draws together screendance, visual imagery and mobile networked devices.
Text Via MEDEA
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The baby time-lapse trend
May 19, 2012
Baby time-lapses – which see parents take daily images of their child, and run them together – are becoming increasingly common. So are they now the ultimate way of documenting a child’s development?
Parents have always been fond of storing sentimental keepsakes – a first tooth or lock of hair – as their child grows up.
And pictures marking significant milestones – birthdays or their first day of school – are a mainstay of mantelpieces.
But there is now a much more ambitious trend in cataloging a child’s growth. And rather than being something typically kept within the privacy of the home, it prides itself on going public.
Excerpt of an article written by Vanessa Barford, BBC. Continue HERE
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Smell the Artist: Peter De Cupere
May 17, 2012
By exploiting the subjective, associative impact of smells, in combination with visual images, Peter De Cupere generates a kind of meta-sensory experience that goes beyond purely seeing or smelling. Plastic artist De Cupere paints with scents, produces olfactory objects, soap paintings and sculptures, creates video and live performances, makes three-dimensional drawings and builds poetic smell installations.
Everyone who has ever smelt Peter De Cupere‘s work cannot fail to recognise that his works prompt quite a reaction. You either love it or you feel attacked via your nasal senses. If the latter is true it is often because the spectator adopts a reserved attitude at first as a result of being wary of the unknown. That is exactly why smells in art have been and are still positively avoided. People like to compare and want a return or recognition. This is difficult with smells because they act directly on the limbic system and don‘t give you the necessary time and chance to translate things like you do with „sight“. Smells act on your memory subconsciously and so you associate your own subjective feelings with a specific smell. Your attitude to the object is determined by the smell memory of a certain moment. Add then the combination with the visual aspect of the artwork and you get a mix that does not appear to be completely predictable. Alongside the pleasance of some smells there are also smells that warn us of danger though we do not always need these indications because of habituation. If you cross the street there are many damaging smells present because of pollution: exhaust fumes, rotting processes from discarded foodstuffs, toxic fumes from asphalt and other building materials that are freed by heat from the sun, polluted rain, sewers, etc. But the normal city person has become used to all the exhaust fumes and other air-polluting substances.
Smoke Room, 750.000 used cigarette butts.
Olfactiano: A piano-like instrument that emits different smells when played called ‘Scent Concerts.’
Smell Me Project.
Text via Peter De Cupere
First image above VIA
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WWF: Two Earths Needed by 2030 to Sustain World Population
May 17, 2012
The equivalent of two Earths will be required to support the world’s population by 2030. That is the stark warning made by the WWF’s Living Planet Report 2012, which was put together in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Global Footprint Network. It warns that the size of the planet’s population and the resulting consumption of environmental resources, such as food and fuel, is unsustainable at current rates. “If we keep on taking more renewable resources than can be replenished, then eventually they will become depleted,” the report stated. “This has already happened locally in some places, for example the collapse of cod stocks in Newfoundland in the 1980s.
Excerpt of an article written by Nicholas Edmondson, IBT. Continue HERE
Download the Living Planet Report 2012 HERE
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Time-lapse map of Europe
May 15, 2012Fast forwarding from ca 1000 AD until 2003 showing Europe’s shifting borders, alliances, unions, territories, occupied land, etc.
Software: Centennia
Music: Inception OST
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This house wants to defeat ageing entirely: A debate about ageing (Aubrey de Grey vs. Colin Blakemore)
May 9, 2012
“This house wants to defeat aging entirely” (Part 1 – Main debate)
Dr. Aubrey de Grey (proposing) and Professor Colin Blakemore (opposing)
A public debate organized by Oxford University Science Society, held in the Sheldonian Theater in Oxford on April 25th, 2012.
(Part 2 – Audience Q&A)
Dr. Aubrey de Grey: De Grey’s research focuses on whether regenerative medicine can thwart the aging process. He works on the development of what he calls “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” (SENS), a tissue-repair strategy intended to rejuvenate the human body and allow an indefinite lifespan. To this end, he has identified seven types of molecular and cellular damage caused by essential metabolic processes. SENS is a proposed panel of therapies designed to repair this damage. Text via Wiki
Professor Colin Blakemore: Professor Colin Blakemore, Ph.D., FRS, FMedSci, HonFSB, HonFRCP, is a British neurobiologist who is Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and University of Warwick specialising in vision and the development of the brain. He was formerly Chief Executive of the British Medical Research Council (MRC). He is best known to the public as a communicator of science but also as the target of a long-running animal-rights campaign. According to The Observer, he has been both “one of the most powerful scientists in the [UK]” and “a hate figure for the animal rights movement”. Text via Wiki
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The Contemporary Sumo Lifestyle
May 9, 2012
On Cuteness & Manufacturing Trauma
May 9, 2012“Zack loves dinosaurs but until now he has never seen one bigger than himself. This is his reaction. Zack is 2 1/2 years old.”
ZeroN, MIT student creates computer-controlled “magic” levitation
May 9, 2012“What if materials could defy gravity, so that we could leave them suspended anywhere in mid-air? ZeroN is a new tangible interface element that can be levitated and moved freely by computer in a three dimensional space. Both the computer and people can move the ZeroN simultaneously. In doing so, people and computers can physically interact with one another in 3D space.
Users are invited to place or move the ZeroN just as they can place any other objects on surfaces. Once levitated, ZeroN’s behavior can be digitally programmed. For example, users can place the sun above physical objects to cast digital shadows, or place a planet that will start revolving based on simulated physical conditions.
ZeroN can remember how it has been moved. Physical motions of people can be collected in this medium to preserve and play them back indefinitely. When the users move release the ZeroN, it continues to float and starts to move along the same path. This allows a unique, tangible record of a user’s physical presence and motion which will continue to exist even after the death of the person.”
Text via Jinha Lee
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Ventricular assist system keeps failing hearts beating
May 9, 2012A ventricular assist system, or VAD, is a implantable device that is used to help a failing heart pump blood through the body, often while the patient is awaiting a heart transplant. It consists of a control system and an energy supply worn outside the body and a pump implanted by the heart or in the abdominal pouch. VADs are generally used to take blood from the left ventricle or deliver it to the aorta. They may also be used to take blood from the right ventricle and deliver it to the pulmonary artery. The latest VADs use continuous-flow pumps that use electric currents to spin a rotor that accelerates blood through the pump. The rotor uses electromagnetic or hydrodynamic suspension instead of ball-bearing suspension, reducing wear-and-tear on the rotor. Source: American Heart Association, FDA
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James Fallon: Confessions of a Pro-Social Psychopath
April 28, 2012Neuroscientist James Fallon is a self-styled “hobbit scientist.” The rules are simple: Don’t talk to the press and don’t go out of your area of expertise. But when a fascinating new brain scanner enters the lab, Fallon can’t resist. He ends up breaking both rules, and learns a lot more about himself than he bargained for.
Photo/Nykto
April 26, 2012
Photo/Nykto is an experimental game conceived by Annelore Schneider and Douglas Edric Stanley as part of the « Unterplay » project at the Master Media Design —HEAD, Genève. It is a game for nyktophobes and photophobes. It is played by switching on and off the lights in order to avoid reaching the edge of the screen. The score increases exponentially near the edges, and speeds up with each change from light to dark and back.
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From paralysis to prose: “How I came to write a book to help you through shit times”
April 26, 2012
Jessica Jones writes:
1987 – I was twenty-five years old and holed up in the intensive care unit at the National Neurological Hospital in London, stricken from head to toe with Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Symptoms: total paralysis. Prognosis: uncertain.
Guillain Barré Syndrome is a bizarre illness. It attacks the myelin sheath that transmits messages along one’s peripheral nerves. One day my toes went numb. A week later I found myself in hospital, unable to move, breathe or speak. An unscratchable itch on my leg could propel me to the brink of insanity. Dust fell into my eyes and I couldn’t blink or wipe it away. I could not call out for assistance.
Upon learning of my perilous condition, my mother had dropped everything, packed a suitcase and flown from Sydney. Now she sat by my bedside for twelve hours a day, every day.
Continue at The Independent
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Ukrainian Body: Exhibition Forbidden
April 26, 2012On February 10th, 2012, the President of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Serhiy Kvit banned “The Ukrainian Body”, an exhibition that explores the issues of corporality in contemporary Ukrainian society. The entrance to the gallery is now locked. Serhiy Kvit explained his decision in the following way: “It’s not an exhibition, it’s shit”.
After the act of censorship concerning the exhibition «Ukrainian Body», which drew a wide response in the Ukrainian and foreign media, the President of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Serhiy Kvit has initiated a number of bureaucratic restrictions against the VCRC as the organizers of the exhibition. On February 23rd the Academic Council’s decision stopped the activities of VCRC. The governing body of NaUKMA were exasperated by the public attention and the condemnation of censorship at the ‘most democratic’ university. As a result of the administration’s sanctions, the work of Visual Culture Research Center is no longer possible.
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Inventing the Future: On the Future Anterior and Philo-Fictions
April 26, 2012A lecture by Professor John Mullarkey titled Inventing the Future: On the Future Anterior and Philo-Fictions at Jerwood Visual Arts.
John Mullarkey is Professor of Film and Television Studies at Kingston University, London. He is the author of Bergson and Philosophy (1999), Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (2006), Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (2010) and he edited, with Beth Lord, The Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy (2009). Mullarkey is also an editor of the journal Film-Philosophy.
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Meet Arvind Gupta and his Toys from “Trash”
April 25, 2012
Arvind Gupta is an Indian toy inventor that popularizes science. His series of films by Arvind Gupta Toys is absolutely wonderful.
Books on Education from Arvind Gupta
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ExoHand and CogniGame by Festo
April 25, 2012The ExoHand from Festo — an active manual orthosis with sensitive fingers.
The ExoHand from Festo is an exoskeleton that can be worn like a glove. The fingers can be actively moved and their strength amplified; the operator’s hand movements are registered and transmitted to the robotic hand in real time.
ExoHand – human-machine interaction
CogniGame is a reinterpretation of a well-known video game that was launched on the market in the 1970s. As in table tennis, the players used a joystick in order to move a bar up and down the screen to keep a ball in play.
CogniGame – control by thought
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Beautifully Deadly, Self-Guided Bullets
April 25, 2012
A tiny light-emitting diode, or LED, attached to a self-guided bullet at Sandia National Laboratories shows a bright path during a nighttime field test that proved the battery and electronics could survive the bullet’s launch.
Researchers have had initial success testing the design in computer simulations and in field tests of prototypes, built from commercially available parts, Jones said.
While engineering issues remain, “we’re confident in our science base and we’re confident the engineering-technology base is there to solve the problems,” he said.
Sandia’s design for the four-inch-long bullet includes an optical sensor in the nose to detect a laser beam on a target. The sensor sends information to guidance and control electronics that use an algorithm in an eight-bit central processing unit to command electromagnetic actuators. These actuators steer tiny fins that guide the bullet to the target.
Excerpt of a press release by Sandia
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Jurema Action Plant
April 21, 2012
Jurema Action Plant is an interactive bio-machine. It consists in a customized machine which interfaces a sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica).
Jurema Action Plant aims to empower plants by enabling them to use similar technologies as humans use. It is also explores new ways of communication and co-relation between humans, living organism and a machine. Much like humans, animals and machines, the plants have an electrical signal traveling inside them, but they do not have nerves like humans and animals; nor wires and cables like machines. This electrical signal travels inside the cells of the plant. Inspired by this phenomenon, I collaborated with professor Bert van Duijn from the Biology University and the Hortus Botanicus, both from Leiden, on a research into the Action Potential of this plant. At V2_ , we settled upon a solution in which a signal amplifier reads the differences in the electromagnetic field around the plant to determine when it is being touched. These electromagnetic variations trigger movement of the robotic structure, on which the plant is situated, by means of a custom-made circuit board. The thresholds for response are set in such a way that only touching the plant makes it move away from the person touching it.
“Their movement however generally remains invisible to us, because their muscle and nerve-like systems operate at a very slow timescale and their rooting in soil confines their motion to the movement of branches and leaves. These restrictions give plants an enormous disadvantage compared to their main aggressors: animals and humans, in many instances resulting in a loss of biodiversity and even extinction.” (Michel van Dartel, curator V2)
To measure the Action Potential from the plant some electrodes are placed in its branches. When the leaves and branches of the plant are touched this signal changes. This electrical signal travels in the plant and the Action Potential can be measured in any part of the plant, not necessarily where the electrodes are placed. If the plants can fell the touch and this signal travels inside the plant and be can be measured in any part, does it means that plants have memory, consciousness?
Text and Images via Ivan Henriques’ Jurema Action Plant
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Jetman (Yves Rossy) soars above the Swiss Alps
April 21, 2012The ultimate dream of flight – soaring through the air, with total freedom in all three dimensions, not within a heavy and complicated machine but with only one’s body and sensations – a dream everybody had at least once in their life.
JETMAN made it real.
Test flights in Swiss airspace.
JETMAN
Yves Rossy
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The Tokyo Zoo Project
April 17, 2012
CHALLENGE:
The “nav-u” U35 is a personal navigation device you can put on a bicycle.
We wanted to demonstrate the device by using the attractions of Tokyo, a city whose roads developed in irregular and complex ways.
IDEA:
Using the running log function of the bicycle navigation system, we started the project by drawing gigantic animal geoglyphs over Tokyo. People tweet what animals they want us to draw. From their requests, our staffers draw animals over the map.
The bike group rides all over Tokyo, logs the routes and uploads the drawing to the website immediately. Progress status with drawing and running footage are posted on Twitter in real time every day.
Fifteen animals are completed in 40 days.
RESULT:
The project was featured in TV news shows, newspapers, magazine articles, and over 80 online news articles. In addition, it was mentioned innumerable times on blogs and tweets. Moreover, it was also reported in other countries, and we received lots of positive feedback, support and messages of encouragement.
Before the campaign, Sony held third place in the market for navigation systems, but it rose to the first just two weeks after the start of the campaign.
A promotion for a bicycle navigation system also became a promotion for the city of Tokyo.
The Tokyo Zoo Project
Via Popupcity
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‘INTIMACY 2.0′
April 15, 2012‘INTIMACY′ is a fashion project exploring the relation between intimacy and technology. Its high-tech garments entitled ‘Intimacy White’ and ‘Intimacy Black’ are made out of opaque smart e-foils that become increasingly transparent based on close and personal encounters with people.
Social interactions determine the garmentsʼ level of transparency, creating a sensual play of disclosure.
INTIMACY 2.0 features Studio Roosegaardeʼs new, wearable dresses composed of leather and smart e-foils which are daringly perfect to wear on the red carpet. In response to the heartbeat of each person, INTIMACY 2.0 becomes more or less transparent.
Currently Studio Roosegaarde is selecting haute couture designers to develop the next INTIMACY 3.0 fashion line for men and women.
Specifications: 2010-2011. ʻBlackʼ and ʻWhiteʼ dresses, length 100cm, width 40 cm. Smart foils, wireless technologies, electronics, LEDs, copper and other media.
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Robotic rings for wearable robotic interaction and Interactive plants that react and convey emotions
April 15, 2012
Inside Foxconn: How an iPad is made
April 14, 2012Marketplace Shanghai Bureau Chief Rob Schmitz is only the second reporter ever to gain access to visit the factory floor at Apple’s Chinese producer Foxconn. See highlights from his tour of the assembly line and the Foxconn facilities and connect to his full audio reports on your public radio station and at http://www.marketplace.org. Marketplace is produced and distributed by American Public Media.
Source Credit – American Public Media’s ‘Marketplace’.
Reporter Credit – Rob Schmitz, Shanghai Bureau Chief
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Can You Live Forever?
April 12, 2012Discovery Channel documentary show about curious questions in science, technology, society etc. In each episode different question is being answered or is tried to be answered, featuring different celebrity host.
Season 01, Episode 11 : Can You Live Forever?
Host : Adam Savage
Meet Titica – Africa’s first openly transgender music star
April 5, 2012
“African governments don’t want us thinking that “homosexuality” is within the realm of their “traditional values”. So apparently these leaders, even Nobel Peace Prize winning ones, use that as an excuse to justify the persecution and lack of protection for some of their most vulnerable citizens. Well, it seems that the Angolan government who currently seem to have their hands full (of money?) can’t be bothered to check whether or not popular Kudurista, Titica, fits within that value system… and we’re glad for that. Now, I don’t know the frame through which Angolans are seeing Titica. A little forum and youtube scrolling reveals a divided public (as always).”
Excerpt of a post by Boima Tucker from Africa is a Country Hail Kuduro!
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