Applause

Jason Bruges Studio has created this interesting installation called Applause. An array of computer controlled flags respond to motion. The flags dynamically follow polo players or race cars, turning back and forth to follow the action.

Touched Echo

I'm immediately adding this one to my Personal Favorites. Touch Echo is a stunningly simple and effective outdoor exhibit in Dresden, Germany. It uses bone conduction technology (sound transfered through the bones to vibrate the ear drum, allowing you to hear sounds that have no noise) to listen to the sounds of the 13th February 1945 air raid that happened at that location. Visitors to the site put their elbows on the railing and cup their hands over their ears to hear the raid. I think this is a brilliant use of bone conduction. I particularly like the respectful, meditative pose that it forces listeners to adopt which adds to the experience and the message it has to others watching. This concept also has a sense of magic to it which I really like. The idea of a specific pose transporting you to another place and time, while others around you are unaware, is quite amazing.

Pulse

Pulse is a live visualization of recent emotional expressions written on blogger.com. Blogged emotional expressions are parsed using a list of synonyms which are translated into physical changes on a rubbery heart. This project has a fascinating mix of human emotions and computer data data. Feelings are coded as data in blogs, and the data is turned back into Pulse, an object with its own sense of life. I appreciate that the end result seems very alive, but very robotic at the same time. It appropriately represents the mix of warm emotions and cold data that are feeding it. Pulse is the thesis project of University of the Arts Berlin student, Markus Kison. (Found through Computerlove).

Slow Printing Calendar

I always like innovative clocks, especially ones that use natural ways of showing time passing. This clock, created by Oscar Diaz, is actually a calendar. It controls ink flow through paper so that only one number is filled in a day. It is currently just a prototype. Very cool idea. (Found through swissmiss).

One Day Poem Pavilion

I'm totally in love with this project. It is called the One Day Poem Pavilion. It's the thesis project of Art Center student Jiyeon Song. The pavilion is an experiment in typography. Sun shinning through the dome creates a poem in light on the ground. The poem is reveled, line by line, throughout the day as the sun passes over the pavilion. The content of the poem naturally changes through out the year as the sun shifts it's position in the sky. The poem's message is sensitive to the time of the year, with a 'new life' theme during the summer and a 'reflective' theme in the winter. I appreciate that this project is so simple and yet so complex at the same time. Check out more of Jiyeon's very well written explanation of the pavilion, including sketches and a time lapse video, on the project's website.

Ten Thousand Cents

I'm not sure why, but I'm totally enthralled by Amazon's Mechanical Turk. I just can't get enough information about it. I'm particularly fascinated by Aaron Koblin's artistic take on the the Turk (see previous post - The Sheep Market). His latest project is Ten Thousand Cents, created in collaboration with Takashi Kawashima. Thousands of Mechanical Turk workers were asked to paint a small section of a $100 bill using a custom drawing tool. They were paid one cent for their work. None of the workers were aware of the final image they were contributing to. You can click on any image in the bill to watch how it was drawn. Very cool.

Nokia Nseries Urbanista Diaries

The Nokia Nseries has created an interesting website where they tell a tale of 4 bloggers traveling around the globe and taking pictures, to help sell the Nokia 5 megapixel, GPS enabled phones. The advertising story goes like this... "Once upon a time, 4 travelers began a global quest. They beat a path through our urban jungles to seek out untold stories - to capture time, only to release it back into the world. And they laid out a trail so we cannot lose them". You can track the bloggers' travels and view their geo-tagged photos as the post them. It's a cool, overly dramatized take on selling a phone - I like it. (Found through Comuptuerlove).

Big Dipper

I just finished watching this mesmerizing video of Sarah Van Gameren's recent Big Dipper exhibit at London's Design Museum. The project is a large machine that creates candle-dipped chandeliers. Two rows of strung wicks circle each other, periodically being dipped into wax. The process takes 12 hours to create 24 finished chandeliers. It's really beautiful to watch. (Found through Hip.Young.Thing).

Mark lives in IKEA

Comedian and filmmaker, Mark Malkoff, somehow convinced a New York area IKEA to let him live in their store this week while his apartment was being fumigated. He is filming his experiences and posting them on his website for your viewing pleasure. I had a nightmare about living in IKEA once, so this idea totally fascinates me. As Mark says, 80% of his house is IKEA anyway so what's the difference. Mark will be living at Paramus New Jersey IKEA until Saturday if you are inspired to go visit him. (Found on the ).http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Robotlab's Bios [Bible]

Robotlab is a future thinking group of Germans who create social interaction experiments between people and robots in public spaces. One of their more recent projects is entitled Bios [Bible]. It is a museum exhibit where an industrial robot is writing out the Bible on scrolls in a calligraphic style as monks have traditionally done. If the idea of this makes you gasp a little, that's a good thing. The project is meant to make people question their thoughts on faith and technical progress.

The Sheep Market

Fun with Artificial Artificial Intelligence! The Sheep Market is a bizarre and intriguing collection of 10000 sheep drawings created by workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Each worker was instructed to "draw a sheep facing left" and paid $0.02 for their troubles. You can actually watch the sheep being drawn. My favorite fact about this project is that 662 sheep were rejected - my imagination drools at the idea of what these rejections were based on. (Found through the Sub-Studio Design Blog).

Eric Johnson, meet World

World, meet Industrial Designer and digital music artist extraordinaire, Eric Johnson. Eric just debuted two of his most recent musical experiments at Etsy Labs Handmade Music nights. The first was his very entertaining Theremin Crutches. He recycled an old pair of crutches into a large theremin. The result looks and sounds like someone releasing all the stress the crutches have collected. Love it!

Eric's other project, Sixty Switches of Fury, is even more fabulous. It's a controller made to look like a piece of suburbia. The large section of wall houses 60 (now 61) light switches each controlling a music sample. The switches are arranged in octives like a keyboard, but unlike a keyboard you don't have to hold the keys down. Instead you just turn the switches on or off, creating a more natural and useful interface for those of us with only 10 fingers.

I appreciate Eric's approach to musical instruments because he comes at it from a design background and not just a musical one. The end result is all about the user interface and the interactive experience. The fabulously entertaining music is just a bonus. Eric's work was recently been featured by Wired and Time Out New York. May I just say that Nerdsters are awesome!

Rives - If I ran the Internet

I've recently fallen head over heels for the work of performance poet Rives. His spoken word poetry is incredibly clever and inspiring. Some of my favorites include 'If I rand the Internet' (above), 'Mockingbird' and 'Sign Language'. For more video of Rives' poetry visit his website, shopliftchimes.com

Michael Cross' Bridge

This art instillation called Bridge, by Michael Cross, was part of last year's London Design Festival. The setting is an old church filed with 60 inches of water. As you approach the water you are met by one single stepping stone. Stepping out onto the stone causes a series of small platforms to rise out of the water creating a walkway. As you walk out to the center of the church, the steps disappear behind. You end up peacefully alone above the water, free to take in your surroundings. Sounds wonderful.

Unfortunately, based on people's Flickr photos it looks like the insurance company stepped in and added lifejackets and an escort to the mix as well as cutting out the disappearing steps. The effect isn't quite the same. (Found through Computerlove).

Influences

Phil Hansen's fascinating version of a self portrait has been making the rounds, and rightly so. It is pretty impressive to watch. He uses his bare torso to paint 30 different paintings, one on top of the other. Each painting represents someone who influenced his life, such as Georges Seurat, Stephen Hawking, and Adolf Hitler. The paintings took a total of 30 hours to complete. You can see more of Phil's work at www.philinthecircle.com.

Robin Rhode

Video art is so impressive when it is done well. The work of the South African artist Robin Rhode is great example of how captivating this approach to art can be. He uses chalk, simple props and his own body to create animations. His work was featured at MoMA earlier this year. More images of his work can be seen on the Perry Rubenstein Gallery site.