The four members of Front have developed a method which turns freehand sketches into solid objects by combining two advanced techniques – Motion Capture and Rapid Prototyping. Pen strokes made in the air are recorded with Motion Capture and become 3D digital files; these are then materialised through Rapid Prototyping into real pieces of furniture.
I love this – it seems like drawing without paper. The world becomes the ground.
Research for Animals, Humans, and Those in Between:
Hogzilla is a posthumously famous hybrid of Hampshire swine and wild boar. He was shot and killed outside of Alapaha, Georgia (pop. 682) on the 17th of June, 2004 by a man named Chris Griffin. Griffin and the man who owns the plantation, Ken Holyoak, were the only witnesses to the slaying. They both claim that the hog weiged over 1000 pounds and was 12 feet long. The only proof is a photo of Griffin next to the hog after the shooting, as they buried the beast soon after it died—the reasons given were that wild hog meat is nasty and the head was far too large to mount on a wall. Apparently, they had to use a backhoe to bury Hogzilla.
Hogzilla’s story was not over, however. Sometime near the beginning of 2005 a group of scientists from MIT dug Hogzilla back up to examine his body for a documentary. The scientists disputed the claims of Holyoak and Griffin, verifying that in reality Hogzilla only weighed in at around 800 pounds and was probably no more than 8.6 feet in length.
Apparently, a movie about Hogzilla has been made called “Hogzilla: The Other White Meat Bites Back.” A trailer is available for viewing at hogzillaonline.com. Also of interest is that Hogzilla makes an appearance in the video game “Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2” as a boss at the end of a level.
Pierrot the Owl
This is Pierrot. He is an ancient spirit animal, who started life as a cave drawing probably somewhere near Lascaux France. He has been travelling the world in various incarnations, but spent a long time as a decorative motif of the Heugenots in Holland before immigrating to the Americas. Pierrot was also spotted amongst the Indians who guided Lewis and Clark through the frontier. Most recently he has taken up residence in Brooklyn, New York.
Pierrot, like many ancient spirits has dual aspects. He represents the yin and yang, birth and destruction, hope and fear, blah blah. As a spirit guide, he also reflects the entirety of the spirit and not just the noblest aspects. He can be excited and engaged or hungover and smoking a cigarette. Sometimes you will catch him doing both at once. He is mostly a solitary beast.
I was recently tasked in my class Animals, Humans, and Those in Between with what may just be the most badass assignment ever—Draw yourself alongside your animal spirit guide. Here’s the somewhat rushed result – me alongside a Barred Owl, aka the Hoot Owl. Apparently, I am the Midwestern Harry Potter.
The main rationale for using the owl as my spirit animal came from taking an online quiz, Teen Magazine style. They stereotyped me as being an “Owl”. Whatever, there wasn’t much explanation, but maybe it has something to do with me being a bit of an eccentric loner who works best during the evening hours? (half of NYU’s ITP program, described right there) Owls are beautiful critters though, and fun to draw – so I took it as flattery.
Thanks for the link Sam. Apparently by analyzing blood-flow in the brain researchers are able to reconstruct images inside the test subject’s head. This is both terrifying and amazing. I would love to be able to draw using only my mind. Even better though is the following possibility – from the article:
ATR chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani says, “This technology can also be applied to senses other than vision. In the future, it may also become possible to read feelings and complicated emotional states.”
This was buried at the end of a Frieze Magazine article about conceptual art. Some of it sounds familiar to anyone following the discourse about design as a discipline, but I’m really interested in the idea of artistic exploration creating the systems that then feed into “experiences” like riding the bus or cooking a meal. When (not if) will we reach a point where artists—designers—customize our everyday lives in incredible detail?
The customization of epistemological Conceptualism represents the most significant paradigm shift in living memory, as design professions migrate from myopic design assignments – design me a toaster – towards conceiving the intangible commodities that feed the experience economy – design me a system. Ways to describe this nascent paradigm vary – Banny Banerjee at Stanford Institute of Design talks about ‘design thinking’; at the Experience Design Group in Stockholm, Rolf Hughes and I consider it as a trans-disciplinary form of ‘disruptive innovation’ – but held in common is the belief that designers should be critical thinkers and strategists first, capable of addressing cross-disciplinary problems by designing the social, political, economic and educational ‘systems’ that give them greater reach, responsibility, influence and relevance. It is reasonable to conclude that the Conceptual artists whose work first embodied ontological and epistemological methodologies were engaged in the rarest research of all, known as fundamental research. Perhaps this is an accolade deserved by the designers who carried over those methods into an ‘economy of borrowed ideas’, without regard to whether or not the knowledge discovered would be of direct practical use.
I LOVE plastic. Just sayin’. In particular, I’ve been blown away by how quickly and professionally the NYU Advanced media studio produces my designs from lasercut acrylic. Just a quick post about the flat-pack chandelier, and the Pet Sounds mask I created using the rapid prototyping services. Here’s a few photos—the objects were designed in Adobe Illustrator, and any other information about the lasercutting process can be found on the AMS website.
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| From ITP – Pcomp |
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| From ITP – Pcomp |
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| From ITP – Pcomp |
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| From ITP – Pcomp |
Clay Shirky had a great quote – “Obama is Harry Potter.” This is true, in the sense that Barack Obama is a remarkable pop culture icon, a superhero amalgamation of memes, media, and technology. He’s also a major sign of hope, and a great indicator that the future of our country might not be so dark. Which is why I love this photo.
found on laserportraits.net
The game just changed. Half the world doesn’t own a computer. But they all have cell phones. And Google will more than likely be providing the software. Now if only we didn’t have to deal with telecom companies…
Wow, that cheesy graphic is awesome!
IEEE Spectrum is an incredible magazine. They just came out with an issue, which you can read online, about the Singularity. If you don’t know what it is, here’s a quote from the author Vernor Vinge:
I think it’s likely that with technology we can in the fairly near future create or become creatures of more than human intelligence. Such a technological singularity would revolutionize our world, ushering in a posthuman epoch.
There’s a lot of theories, some good, some evil. It’s really interesting.
Here’s an article from the excellent StrangeHarvest. It really made me think, and it has a great title.
Lemon Squeezy: Design Tendencies after the Juicy Salif.
A couple quotes from the article:
…Contemporary design produces devices that are not intended to perform as advertised: as chair, table, lamp or whatever. They are devices whose function is a particular kind of cultural experience…
…If design can no longer be judged by its functional utility, the terms of reference for understanding the success of a design become more complex. Equally, form, composition and other aesthetic qualities are only the means by which an effect is manifested, not ends in themselves. Effect is how the design communicates cultural content and is therefore the primary attribute of contemporary design.
Designs apparent impracticality is not failure; it is the point from which it explores possibilities of contemporary culture (for those who find this a ridiculously pretentious position, there are plenty of products that work). This is why design chairs are almost always more uncomfortable than other kinds of chairs, why design tables are a challenge to use…
To the extent I’ve thought about these things, I pretty much agree with what the author is saying. It seems to me that most designers inherently understand these ideas before starting a project however… You’re never selling the object, you’re always selling the lifestyle and the accessories that come with it. In our current media-saturated culture, isn’t that as natural as breathing?
This could be really interesting. There’s not a lot of info on the site about this conference, but even the list of topics is inspirational. It’s in Budapest, which is also extremely cool.
Non-Western countries and developing countries are integrating social networking and mobile devices into their society much more quickly than many Western societies. Western notions of privacy and community seem quite distinct from the rest of the world, so as these technologies diffuse we may see some pretty cool things emerge.
Mobile Communication and the Ethics of Social Networking
Conference to take place in Budapest, September 25–27, 2008
Contributions are invited from philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, media theorists, and other interested scholars on the following and related topics:
Ethical implications of mediated relationships
The mobile internet
Exploring the self through social networking
Mobile social networking and citizen journalism
Mutual respect und acknowledgement
Gossip and social cohesion
The re-interpretation of privacy
Geobrowsing, privacy, and GPS-equipped phones
Real and virtual identities
M-learning, life-long learning
Inclusion of elderly people
Exclusion and the network effect
Social networking and big business
Conversational marketing
Netocracy
Fraud and secrecy
Surveillance
Informatics challenging bioethics (genomics and the new biology)
Amazing. Check it out on the TED site.
Just got around to checking this out a little – I’m way late on this one and I really have no excuse. Immediately ordered the book from Amazon.com. I wish I could check this out in person.
From the article in Seed Magazine:
“What we’re witnessing today is the emergence of a singular design creativity. Taking their cues from sources as varied as nanostructures, biological systems, topography, and cosmology, designers are introducing new areas of study and influence to their field and endowing their objects with new types of functional gradients. The goal is to facilitate as seamless a movement as possible from fast to slow, virtual to physical, cerebral to sensual, automatic to manual, dynamic to static, mass to niche, global to local, organic to inorganic, and proprietary to common, to mention just a few extreme couplings. Much of this is being done by bona fide designers, but scientists and artists have also turned to design to give method to their productive tinkering, what John Seely Brown has called “thinkering.” They all belong to a new culture in which experimentation is guided by engagement in the world and by open, constructive collaboration with colleagues and other specialists.”
Nothing else to say. It’s been said!
I’m reading a bit into it, but I love this link Sam sent me because it’s as if someone has managed to create an art form that taps into one of my main anxieties about modern life. Speaking into a cellphone, listening to music on an iPod, playing a videogame, building a website — all activities that to someone outside of our current technological framework would consider irrelevant and mystifying. Jon without Garfield (technology, in my metaphor) lives a life of isolation and purposelessness. He speaks to himself and generally acts insane…
Quoted from the site:
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.
A really interesting meta-phenomenon for anybody who remembers the Boston terrorist scare that was sparked by a guerilla ad campaign for the Aqua-Teen Hunger Force last year. Artists have created their own LED guerilla pieces and put them up around town. Click here to check it out. Brilliant.
I love the idea of currency whose value is not tied to resources but basic humanity. It’s a fascinating idea, and one that begs to be experimented with in small-scale projects.
From Wikipedia: The usual economic incentives have disappeared from the book’s world. Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely lose you points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-loved symphony will earn you Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it.
A gross Whuffie score looks the same to everyone viewing it, but a weighted Whuffie score is subjective. This meta-Whuffie takes into account right-handed Whuffie (the amount given by people you like) and left-handed Whuffie (given by people you dislike). Another variety is pity Whuffie, given to those who are down on their luck.
The idea for Whuffie originated in the book above, written by Cory Doctorow – BoingBoing editor and all-around inspirational dude.
Fascinating article from Nick Bostrom of the Oxford philosophy department. This idea, or a very similar one, was widely covered in the news a few months ago.
This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
To me, this is more evidence of technology causing convergence. Religion, philosophy and computers, in this case…
Miltos Manetas really seems be working towards a reflection of the iPod and Nintendo generation. He’s trying to address the way people live with technology in both sensual and intellectual ways. I really look forward to seeing more of his work.
To me, the current zeitgeist is really wonderful. It’s cyborg, biomech, green, organic, technical, mechanical, chaotic and systemic. It’s a bit like everything that exists in our culture and politics – an experimental gray area, contrary and polarized. So it feels appropriate to use tools that can help create these things for us – a further extension of our cyborg brains and bodies.
Pulled off of Arkitip’s excellent new site.
Sylvère Lotringer, 2003
WITH MIKE EDISON
Sylvère changed intellectual life in America by introducing French critical theorists such as jean Baudrillard through his homegrown imprint, semiotext(e). His latest effort, Crepuscular Dawn, is an extended conversation with the philosopher Paul Virilio.
MIKE: One of the ideas you discuss with Paul Virilio is that, while McLuhan said, “the medium is the message,” it’s not just the medium anymore. It’s the speed of the medium that is significant now. Velocity actually becomes the message.
SYLVÈRE: Right. Well, first of all, McLuhan had a very optimistic vision of the world. He thought that the world would become a global village, that we would all communicate, and in spite of our differences, that the medium was going to unite us. But instead of becoming active, we are all stuck at home with our telephones, our computers, our faxes, and the internet. We have all these prostheses, as if we somehow became disabled. We are prisoners of the technology. And the medium itself, which is only electronic transmissions, is also changing us.
From Brandon Bird. Wow. Here’s the link to the mask.
John Divola has some fascinating work from the last four decades up on his site.
Awesome, and very pretty, photo essay and interview snippets about the Taliban at Magnum photography.
