Aquapets’ questionable design

Aquapets are officially recommended for children ages 5 and up, but they look as if they should be labeled NC-17. BB points out the obvious phallicity factor here, but what about the backstory? You have to wonder how such a product gets stamped for approval when it directly resembles a giant trouser snake.

…

Originally
from core77.com's design blog

reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 20, 2006, 6:04PM

Moto Colors

Motorola emphasizes their selection of colorful cellular devices with their new Moto Colors site. Make sure to choose different colors in orer to experience all the fun patterns.

…

Originally
from core77.com's design blog

reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 20, 2006, 5:56PM

Avaf Bag

Psychedelic Artists, Assume Viviv Astro Focus go Takashi Murakami* with their own line of bags by Le Sportsac

*Reference made to Japanese Artist Takashi Murakami’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton even though Le Sportsac is hardly LV.

related links

Assume Vivid Astro Focus by Le Sportsac
AVAF: Assume Vivid Astro Focus

Originally
from sensoryimpact.com

by adnan


reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 18, 2006, 7:07PM

Vida 9.0 and Artbot Gent

Robot maniacs and fans of artificial intelligence, rejoice! The list of the winners of Vida 9.0, Art & Artificial Life International Competition is online (congratualtion to Andy.) So is the casting of the upcoming Artbot, it will be held in Gent on December 2 and 3. And if you’re in the neighbourhood join us at Art+Game, a series of conferences, screenings, performances and exhibitions about game culture in Brussels, Dec. 1-4.

The images above show a work by US/ Taiwan artist Shih Chieh Huang, EX-DD-06. Prefabricated electronics are stripped down and then recombined in a way which is at once familiar, and alienated by a playful recontextualisation where they are made to interact with one another, and with the spectators.

For example, by linking an automatic light switch to video footage of the artist’s eye, the relationship established between human blinking and a flashing light bulb appears both oddly logical and deeply poetic. When movements of multiplied eyeball images on a video screen are used to control inflatable plastic tubes and coloured lights connected to the monitor, the resultant creature seems to live a life of its own. All “organs” of the creatures inhabiting this interactive space are deliberately kept transparent through the use of different kinds of plastics. Paradoxically, this legibility of their “bodily” functions makes them still more mysterious and biologically convincing, like luminescent jellyfish.

Images.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 17, 2006, 7:40AM

Bodylandscapes

Artist Rebecca Horn currently has a big exhibition in Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau. The show very chronologically shows her work, thus almost becoming a retrospective. All the media that Horn worked with so far since the 1960s are present, from the famous Pencil Mask and other performance-related works, drawings, installations, poetry to various film and video pieces.

Especially impressive are the works that use some form of mechatronics to move wings, feathers, knives or, in one case, a puddle of mercury. The Guardian benevolently describes it as a “Germanic pleasure in precision engineering”, I’d call it very subtle and poetic.

Through January 15th. A few pictures on Flickr.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Sascha


reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 20, 2006, 8:01PM

Six Muses of Randomness

Six white mice reside among books on logic subjects inside a laboratory cabinet, nibbling on the pages.

As they wander around the AbA Logic installation, they trigger a databank of words connected to electronic boards. The boards make up two sentences of three words each (called AbA-logic statements). Each time a mouse triggers a sensor, a new statement appears. The words (adjectives, adverbs and nouns) are common in logic terminology. The statement that appear are obviously less common.

The statements they are printed as they appear. On AbA’s desk piles of sketches and notes from the process accumulates.

In addition, the mice -through their nibbling- are creating sculptural rephrasing of the books, and produce new combinations of the texts and illustrations from the pages of the books.

A work by Kalle Grude and Jan Løchstøer at AbA / Art by Accident. Coding by Håkon Lindbäck.

Image by Jana Winderen. More pictures: Leonardo Solaas’flickr and Interface and Society.

Related: Gail Wight‘s Rodentia Chamber Music.

The small ensemble of five transparent chamber instruments is inhabited by mice, who “play” them by triggering electronic whisker switches positioned within the instruments.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 20, 2006, 8:18PM

Yaniv Steiner’s talk on rapid prototyping process

Yesterday i attended the Italian edition of World Usability Day and found it really good.

The conference focused on two themes: How prototypes can promote usability and Integrating usability and creativity to achieve ‘pleasure of use’. Yaniv Steiner was part of the first panel and he gave a truly inspiring talk. The audio is online, the slides of his presentation and the links as well (and no, don’t even try to ask, i have no intention to do anything similar for any of the talks i give) so i’ll just sum up his ideas.

Yaniv is a prototyping specialist, game player and developer, software and hardware developer, Head of R&D at experientia and the founder of Nastypixel which is a “prototyping sweatshop” and i’m sure i’m forgetting something here. I first met him when he was teaching at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea. He’s also teaching at the University of Architecture in Venezia and at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.

He doesn’t define himself as an interaction designer, because he believes that Interaction Design is an “entity made of designers, artists, technologists, and cognitive scientists.” The key is the communication, the unification of language and methods to achieve one goal: the product.

While he was working at Ivrea he lead a brilliant project called InstantSOUP, it’s a path into electronics using an approach of “learning by making”, introducing electronic prototyping in a playful, non-technical way to designers and artists. It makes the first steps into the world of physical prototyping almost as easy as preparing Instant Soup.

Two of his students at IDII, Michael Albers and Shawn Bonkowski, applied the lessons of InstantSOUP to FloorIt, arcade car racing brought to life.

Yaniv also talked about process, one of the most important elements of rapid prototyping:

1. Collect the user data, observe it, understand it and act by it. Take your first assumption, try it on your own team, then push it forward by taking it out of the team and give it to users (the car racing toy to kids for example) and observe, take pictures, make videos, etc.

2. Stay in Beta. In software development you develop a beta version, test it, twitch it, correct its problems then you sell it as a “product.” That’s an old fashioned way to look at things. E.g. Microsoft Vista vs Google. So keep it open and design for changes. Your first assumption is not what you’re going to end up with at the end.

For him, computer game is the best place to check usability. In game, usability is so important it has its own name and it’s called Game Play. If it’s not fun no one will play your game. That’s a real challenge because it means that you have to let people play for months or even months before deciding that the game is a success. Today people don’t design the core of the games, they design the editor. This could be applied to other contexts, not only in software.

Nastypixel and experientia work on the concept of assumption-breaking design, assumptions give the kick off but as soon as you start designing forget about those first assumptions you had because it’s going to change all the time. Example: a project he designed along with Ofer Luft. SmartRetina, a lightfast gesture-tracking platform. After having developed that platform they needed a product and came up with Mossalibra, a kind of computer game for clubs.

While dancing to the music, the user (represented in pixelated form as a pure gesture) can mimic a given set of gestures in order to gain points. These gestures are actually pixelated snapshots of previous players.

The developers were quite surprised by the way people used it: they loved MOssalibra but not because of the game element but because it allowed them to glorify themselves in front of other clubbers.

They also converted the SmartRetina system into something else: a visual catalogue of recent art work exhibited at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. It was premiered last weekend at Artissima.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 15, 2006, 2:54PM

Artissima: the new media art-y

Fabio Paris Art Gallery (from Brescia, Italy) was showing a couple of nice works at Artissima, such as Space LED, by Tonylight (see previous post.) My favourite piece at the booth was an eerie picture of a guy i though i’d recognized. He was dressed in white and was cautiously walking in the greenest fields you can dream of. Looked like Hans Bernhard from Ubermorgen to me

psychos_hans_02

The gallery’s press release explained the work as follows: “Hans Bernhard is loaded with 10 years of internet & tech [digital cocaine], mass media hacking, underground techno, hardcore [illegal] drugs, rock&roll lifestyle and net.art jet set… Hans Bernhard’s neuronal networks are connected to the global network, and his mental illness – the bipolar affective disorder that in March 2002 sent him to a mental hospital – is the network’s illness.” That experience, in which those two levels – digital and real, bio & tech, nervous system and operative system – merge is summed up in several works, Psych|OS – Hans No. 02 is one of them.

At some point i heard the gallery owner talk about the artists he was representing. Adorable. Like a dad who’s dead proud of his kids. He was particularly delighted to explain visitors the latest project of Eva and Franco Mattes (a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG), a portrait series of Second Life avatars they made after having lived in the virtual world for over a year. Btw, the 01.org are presenting “13 Most Beautiful Avatars”, a Second Life portrait series, at Second Life’s Ars Virtua gallery, as part of rhizome Time shares exhibits, on November 15 – December 29, and a “real life” show at the Italian Academy will run November 30 – December 19.

SL is very trendy these days, the Jen Bekman gallery‘s current exhibition is called Photographs from the New World. The work, by James Deavin, documents user-generated landscapes in Second Life. In New York until December 9, 2006.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 15, 2006, 5:37PM

Real radish races on the net

Jardiland invites you to take part to a real radish races on Internet.

Unlike The Telegarden -where web users collectively interacted with a remote garden, Jardiland allows each web breeder to remotely manage an autonomous robotic module in which her/his individual radish will be able to grow.

A more accessible and autonomous technology has been developed to spread radish racing boxes all over the world and allow a participant to manage their own radish growing device. The growing boxes are all to be simultaneously closed at the onset of the race. Only the selected breeder will have access to the plant management through www.jardiland.org. The player will have to judiciously administer an array of radish growing parameters controlling this tiny biosphere.

The gardener must first plant the seed with a small robotic arm, afterwards s/he must daily bring attention to the radish: water it, feed it with fertilizer, turn on and off a grow-lamp, ventilate the box with a fan, and modulate the temperature through a heater and a temperature sensor.

A limited quantity of water, fertilizer and electrical energy will be allocated to each module at the beginning of the race. In consequence, a clever evaluation and use of these factors will be crucial and decisive for a positive outcome.

A webcam will take 3 photos a day and will allow the web gardener to control the growth of his radish – though only the top of the radish will be visible.

After 21 days the modules are opened, the radishes dug up, and the gardener with the biggest radish takes the prize! Subsequently, every breeder will receive by post the radish she has carefully nurtured.

Jardiland blends farming and food supply with issues of telepresence, tele-surveillance, remotely controlled interaction and web community.

A project by France Cadet and Jean-Pierre Mandon.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 16, 2006, 10:29PM

8 Ways to Shoot Video Like a Pro

By Rick Broida

Nothing brings out the camcorders like the holidays, which is why this is the perfect time to admit an ugly truth: You suck at making home movies.

No, really. I’m sure you’re a nice person and all, but there’s more to videography than just taking the camcorder out of the box and pressing Record.

As with photography, good videography requires a bit of know-how. Luckily, I know how, so here’s my list of ways you can improve your home movies. You won’t come out Soderbergh on the other side, nor even Singer, but your Uncle-Henry-dropped-the-turkey-on-Aunt-Edna’s-head submission to America’s Funniest Home Videos will look a lot better.

1. RTFM

A good fisherman knows what’s in his tackle box, and a good videographer knows his camcorder. The moment Junior takes his first steps or a spaceship lands in the backyard, you should be able to adjust the shutter speed, turn off the autofocus, or do whatever else is necessary to capture the best images. In other words, learn your camcorder inside and out. Read the manual–twice. Know how to access the menus, which menus contain which settings, and so on. Keep a crib sheet handy if necessary (laminate a 3×5 card, hole-punch it, and attach it to the neck strap). A little bit of study and preparation can go a long way toward helping you shoot better video. Now, onto the advice you might actually follow.

2. Be prepared

Anytime you go somewhere with your camcorder, here’s what you should be packing:

• • At least one spare battery, fully charged.
• • At least two more blank tapes than you think you’ll need.
• • A lens-cleaning cloth. No matter how careful you are, the lens is going to get smudged. There’s no post-production software filter in the world that can correct for that.
• • A tripod. Throw it in the trunk, even if you don’t think you’ll need it.
• • The battery charger/power supply.
• • An extension cord for the power supply, which you’ll invariably need.
• • Duct tape, for taping down the extension cord so people don’t trip over it.
• • Lighting gear, lens filters, microphones, and any other accessories you own. You bought them for a reason, right? Bring ‘em!

3. Use a tripod

It’s a lot harder than it looks to pull off that cool shaky-camera look. Most home video just ends up looking shaky, which is absolutely no fun to watch. By mounting your camcorder on a $20 tripod, you’ll get rock-steady footage. At the same time, you’ll free yourself to perform pans and zooms, or even to get in front of the lens. If you’re planning to rely on your camera’s digital image-stabilization feature, don’t. All that does is lower the video resolution by cropping to the center of the frame. Optical image stabilization is better, but it still can’t beat a tripod.

No tripod? Lean against a wall. That’ll help keep the shakiness to a minimum. No wall? Put your butt on the ground, bend your knees, and prop your elbows on them. Presto: instant tripod.

4. Raise the lights

To paraphrase the old real estate maxim, good videography is all about lighting, lighting, lighting. Most of the camcorders I’ve reviewed over the years do a really crummy job under poor lighting, producing grainy, washed-out video that can’t be improved in post-production. (Hey, there’s only so much your video-editing software can do.) The easiest way to overcome lighting issues is to shoot outdoors, where even a cloudy day produces enough ambient light to keep your video crisp and colorful. If it’s sunny, try to shoot in the morning or late afternoon when the sun is lower in the sky. When it’s directly overhead, it casts unflattering shadows on subjects’ faces.

When shooting outdoors isn’t an option, bring as much light into the room as you can. Turn on lamps and open blinds to let outside light in. If your camcorder has a built-in light, use it. At the very least, it will help bring out faces in close-up shots. A shoe-mounted external light can be helpful as well. Many camcorders allow you to adjust aperture, white balance, shutter speed, and other light-oriented settings, but these will get you only so far unless it’s a really high-end model. My advice for when the lights are low is to disable the autofocus, otherwise you risk getting that annoying pulsing effect from the lens trying to lock onto a subject.

5. Ace the audio

If lighting is the most important element in quality video, audio runs a close second. Unfortunately, this is one area where it can be difficult to achieve professional results. The microphones built into most camcorders are fairly basic, recording audio from any direction. If you’re trying to film someone talking near a busy street, the traffic may drown out the person’s voice. Your best bet is to get your subject(s) as close to the microphone as possible (without sabotaging the shot, of course).

Ideally, your camcorder should have a jack for plugging in an external microphone. There are many varieties to choose from, including: shotgun mikes for capturing audio directly in front of the lens; lavaliere (a.k.a. tie-clip) mikes for sit-down interviews and stand-up reporting; and pzm-type mikes, which are omni-directional and therefore suitable for auditoriums, large conference rooms, and the like. Hopefully, any camcorder outfitted with a microphone jack will also have one for headphones, which is essential for monitoring audio levels as you record.

6. Set up your shots

Smart photographers obey the “rule of thirds,” and you should do the same. Imagine a tic-tac-toe board over your viewfinder. The lines intersect in four spots. Your goal should be to frame the action using one or more of those spots. Or, to put it another way, keep the birthday girl out of the center square.

Of course, if you’re feeling creative, you can always throw this rule out the window. But don’t go overboard: Many amateurs fall in love with their camcorders’ built-in special effects, then later regret filming an entire birthday party in “old movie” mode. Although these effects can be fun, use them sparingly–or not at all. Better you should start with pristine color video, then apply special effects using your editing software. Likewise, skip the camcorder’s auto-fade features; your editing software will give you far greater control over transitions, and greater variety as well.

7. No digital zoom!

Optical zoom, good. Digital zoom, bad. Very bad. Sorry if you were suckered into buying a particular camcorder because it touted some astronomical digital-zoom number (240X! 300X! 800X!), you should never use it–unless you like grainy, pixilated video. Digital zoom is actually a big fake: As you increase the zoom level, the camcorder crops further and further into the center of the image, enlarging that cropped portion so it fills the screen. As a result, your video looks, well, awful. Stick with your camcorder’s optical zoom (usually you can turn off digital zoom from within the camera’s menu system), which relies solely on the lens for magnification. If you need to get closer to your subject, follow the old photographer’s maxim: zoom with your feet.

8. Shoot B-roll

B-roll is secondary footage that you splice into your primary video to flesh out the story. For instance, if you’re filming a wedding, you might take shots of the church, the invitation, and the little bride and groom atop the cake. When the time comes to assemble your final movie, you can mix in this footage to add variety.

Anything can be B-roll. During the warm-up before the soccer game, for instance, get some footage of just the kids’ feet. Grab a close-up shot of the ball hitting the net. Get there early and record the empty field; then record from the same position during the game and you can do a neat fade-in. This is where planning comes into play: You should not only allow extra time to shoot B-roll, but also determine in advance what shots will make the best additions.

Rick Broida, Lifehacker’s new associate editor, is the co-author of How to Do Everything with Your Digital Video Camcorder, which was written before the age of YouTube but still makes a great gift.

Originally
from Lifehacker

reBlogged

by michael

on Nov 13, 2006, 5:30PM