I'm just going to give a summary of the course as i feel its spirit might be relevant to the interests of many readers. But i'll keep it short as i've decided a while ago not to cover anything i haven't had the opportunity to see nor experience myself. Rules are supposed to have exceptions, right?

Usable Witchery investigated how products could be less a result of technical thinking, and become more "humanized", natural and intuitive. As Yaniv told me recently: "I will trade many functional elements to magical and slightly more poetical element in any of my devices. I hope the student will apply it one day as they go and work for IDEO and Nintendo J."

Image by Yaniv Steiner

He explains with further details this association between magic and interaction design in a list of reasons why advanced technology can be compared to magic. According to him, interfaces are actually doing the same to some extent. His text illustrates the point by giving examples of interaction procedures, viewed from this frame of reference: calculators displaying, without revealing how, the correct series of digits, mountains of information "leaping" invisibly in the air, "hold" switches, etc.

But still... Harry Pottering design students?

"Regarding the animatronics part, I feel it is dealing with humanization of machines in relation to Physical-Computing," he goes on. "We all saw the blinking LED - Blink; and how motors can move robotic limbs with the grace of "Marvin the paranoid android". We conducted experiments with ways to humanize these artifacts, making them closer to the way we, humans, interact and communicate with the world around us. And thus giving a small humanized illusion."

Image by Synodic Month

Tons of images from Usable Witchery.

Related entries: Yaniv Steiner's talk on rapid prototyping process and Opensourcery (where Zach Lieberman learns a few tricks from Mago Julián.)

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael

Baby Love is art that moves you and your imagination…. Climb aboard a giant teacup and glide into a futuristic fantasy with a dummy-sucking baby doll clone to your favourite love song at Sydney’s new home for contemporary arts, CarriageWorks. Its cathedral-scale foyer will play home to 6 giant teacups, each with a larger-than-life baby doll clone. Baby Love is a wi-fi mobile installation by New York based Taiwanese artist, Shu Lea Cheang, who calls cyber-space ‘home’. Shu Lea is a multi-media artist working in the field of net-based installation, social interface and film production.

Baby Love is an embracing interactive, kinetic and sonic experience, alluding to both past and future as the teacups evoke the nostalgia of amusement park rides and clash with the futuristic vision of cloned babies. The public can contribute to the joyride soundtrack by uploading songs via the web which go directly to the installation. The songs are transmitted wirelessly via Memory-Emotion data to the babies. When the rider selects their love song of choice to begin their teacup ride, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashes.

The cloned babies of Baby Love are an updated version of the central figures in Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies. In the novel, twins born from lockers at a Yokohama Station spend their lives haunted by the sound of their mother’s heartbeat. Cheang’s clones were inspired by scientific research into the development of biobots and artificial life forms. It is an installation which fuses nostalgia for a seemingly simpler age without boggling interactive technology and our contemporary obsessive immersion in the virtual life of the internet. Cheang seems to be asking where will the ever new frontiers of the web take us?

Presented by CarriageWorks, Experimenta and Awesome Arts Baby Love is an umbrella event of Art and About 2007, presented by City of Sydney.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 8:11AM

I'll come back to the event with more information and images but for now i just can't resist talking about one of the 3 installations commissioned by Juha Huuskonene.

Aleph, by Adam Somlai-Fischer and Bengt Sjölén, is a kinetic reflection display system made of 200 side mirrors from cars. A small mirror reflects only a fraction of the space around us; a mirror façade reflects most things around us, containing segments that are dark or bright, red or green. But a matrix of small mirrors, which can adjust their tilt according to the site they are facing, will form a display that uses the ever changing flux of the place to show images from certain points in space. That's exactly what Aleph is doing.

The installation, which will spend six months in the gardens of Belsay, is experienced as a large matrix of reflections of the environment. It uses the spaces, people and objects placed or passing in front of it as a palette to display images from hidden viewpoints.

The reflections in the matrix of mirrors are changing and eventually building up images and other visual information.‭ ‬This is perceived fully from one specific viewpoint at a time,‭ ‬while getting fragmented by moving away from it.‭ ‬The installation produces its content in response to the presence,‭ ‬position and behavior of visitors.

Movement is achieved by‭ ‬2‭ ‬small electric motors, each mirror is equipped with a small circuit board with a microcontroller,‭ ‬a motor driver and an angle sensor.‭ A computer is using cameras to continuously analyze the surroundings, implement interaction and distribute targeting information to a network of microcontrollers positioning the mirrors.

The name Aleph was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges: Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping or confusion.

All my images.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael on May 3, 2007, 9:54PM

By Usman HAQUE & Adam SOMLAI-FISCHER using sensors and actuators developed by the Reorient Team.

The Reconfigurable House is an environment constructed from low tech components that can be "rewired" by visitors. The project is a critique of "smart homes",which are based on the idea that technology should be invisible to prevent DIY. Smart homes actually aren't very smart simply because they are pre-wired according to algorithms and decisions made by designers of the systems, rather than the people who occupy the houses.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo reBlogged by michael on Apr 26, 2007, 1:41PM

Japanese toilet manufacturer Inax has just released their 2007 Satis Asteo Washlet toilet, which is a good example of how toilet design seems to be taken more seriously in Japan than elsewhere.

Some features:

A) The toilet has an SD card, pre-loaded with Bach, Chopin and Mendelsohn. Once you show up to take care of business, a sensor activates the tunes, either to relax you or to prevent houseguests in your thin-walled Japanese apartment from hearing anything other than Bach, Chopin or Mendelsohn.

B) The smoothly-designed exterior of the basin is easy to clean, absent of the dust- and grime-collecting nooks and crannies present in many Western toilets.

C) Another sensor figures out whether you're going to need the seat up or down (crikey, would love to know how this one works) and motorizes it into the appropriate position. After you leave, it automatically places the seat in the down position if it was up, preventing countless marital spats.

D) A nightlight in the bowl helps guide you during those 2am emergencies, though this feature may not be so desirable if you've had too much tequila and are making that other use of the toilet.

The (somewhat poorly Google-translated) webpage is here.

Originally from core77.com's design blog reBlogged by michael on Apr 24, 2007, 11:49AM

Navigable score on music textile XYi

The XY position of the performer's hand contact moving onto the surface of the fabric is transmited to a computeur via a 12 Bytes resolution Midi card. This allows 4000 by 4000 points resolution. Two conductive fabrics are fixed on a frame, each one weaved with conductive threads in a different direction. When the performer presses any point of the textile instrument, the upper layer connects with the fabric underneath and the current eletrical value is sent to the computer.

The videos on the website are pretty impressive. Image gallery.

Developed by Vincent Roudaud and Maurin Donneaud.

Check out the interface during Malaupixel in Paris, the installation will be exhibited at Confluences, on April 16 to 21, 12h-21h.

Related: Sonic Fabric, a musical dress made of textile woven from 50% pre-recorded audiotape and 50% cotton; Sonic City, a wearable piece that enables people to compose music in real time by walking through the city; etc.

Via a place to bookmark/del.icio.us/add to your rss feed: Bioject, Jean-Baptist Labrune's blog.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael on Apr 10, 2007, 10:34PM

Let's just get to the level below:

Akitsugu Maebayashi's Metronome Piece is one of the highlights of the show for me. The artist went for a walk around Oldenburg bringing along a metronome. The clicks produced by the instrument work as 'sonar' which detects information of spaces, and the echoes of tick-tick were recorded binaurally through microphones in the artist's ears.

In the exhibition room, there's a table, a chair and headphones. As you walk near the chair the light dims and you're left with the sound of the metronome. Take the headphones and the experience becomes utterly strange. While you can still perceive the tick-tick (or people coming down the stairs above your head) coming through headphones, you're suddenly wandering the streets of Oldenburg on the steps of Akitsugu Maebayashi. You hear people walking by and talking under the rain, a truck passing, etc. The first time i even looked behind me to check who was there (no one of course, just an audio illusion). Another layer of space and time was overlapping with what was going on around me.

Harar (annicca), by Thomas Köner (of the Banlieu du Vide fame), is projected in the adjacent room. The work is part of the Péripheriques trilogy which shows patterns in the moves of people in the streets and detects stories in their faces. The videos were shooted in 3 different cities (Harar, Belgrade, and a favela in Buenos Aires), original sounds from the filming location blend with imaginary sounds.

Annina Rüst was showing Rock 'n' Scroll, a sound remixing system which allows anyone to use the computer as an acoustic instrument for interventions into wifi-equipped public space. Both mobile phones and computers are connected using a VOIP software. The sound itself is a combination of standard macintosh and windows sounds, as well as sounds included in the Skype software, and pre-made drumloops. There's also a delay effect that depend on how good the connection is.

There were free softwares to take away!

The person who starts the performance has the most control (over the drum loop and the right mouse-button to turn on the microphone while turning off the rhythm.) Other participants function mainly as triggers. But no one has a total control over the whole performance.

Videos.

Image fluctuat

A computer was showing the website of micromusic, a low-tech music community initiated by carl (Gino Esposto), wanga (Paco Manzanares) and bacon (Michael Burkhardt), famous for their performances and compositions that use Gameboys or vintage Atari consoles. The micomusic.net website reflects their objective to build an online community where visitors can listen to and download music and chat.

There are two other projects which i like a lot but i'll pass rapidly on them as i've blogged them before:

Jens Brand is showing G-Turns, the online version of the G-Players series, in an IKEA setting complete with price tags and a carpet with a wave-like pattern.

Visitor can lie in Kaffe Matthews' Sonic Bed and enjoy the sound properties of experimental electronic music throughout their body. There is also a video of the "making of" of the piece.

In conclusion i'd say that the exhibition is really good. There's the fun, the loud, the introspective, the obscure, the aesthetically absorbing. It is not meant to be exhaustive but it gives an adequate overview of the many ways in which artists engage with sound materials these days. I guess i've been very lucky to visit the show on a quiet Thursday afternoon, i was able to enjoy each piece on my own without having to queue to be able to lay on the bed or having any sonic experience interrupted by other noises.

Flickr set.
At the Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg, extended until April 29.

Related: Invisible Geographies: New Sound Art from Germany, an exhibition about the "physical" topography of sound at the Kitchen in New York.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael on Apr 11, 2007, 12:49AM

Computer Crash Course and Game Rider

Set up in cooperation with Hubert Burda Media, creators of DLD conference, and following Tim O’Reilly's Foo Camp, KinnerNet intvited about 150 technology addicts and creative people to gather informally and discuss topics and concepts such as software development, internet culture, social networks, web services, Wi-Fi, open source, cellular services, computer games, interactive TV, VOIP, technological trends, gadgets, security, etc. The general purpose is to share thoughts, work-in-progress, show off the latest tech toys and hardware hacks, and tackle challenging problems. The camp is a closed and private event and participating to it means contributing.

Rafael defines himself as an "artificial vision explorer" at Feng-GUI lab (which developed the ViewFinder, an algorithm that simulates the human eyes and brain and what would be the gaze path of the eye movements while being exposed to visuals. Similar algorithms are embedded into robots) and a member of GarageGeeks (which looks like "crazy projects paradise".)

As part of the Robot Extravaganza of KinnerNet 2007 camp, he presented the GuitarHeroNoid which he built together with Tal Chalozin. The full-scale humanoid autonomously plays the Sony PlayStation game Guitar Hero II (video of GuitarHeroNoid playing the song Woman by Wolfmother).

Can you tell us more about the robot that plays the PlayStation game "Guitar Hero"? How does it work and play?

At the game, each song is presented on a set of five columns, resembling a real guitar fret board, that scroll constantly towards the player. The five columns correspond to the five fret buttons and appropriately colored notes appear in these columns.
We connected the PlayStation video output using a capture device into a computer and by live video streaming filter capture the video frames as images. Each image is being processed and the detected notes are sent through the parallel output or through network cable directly into the robot. This distributed architecture is also used by a robotics bio-technology called Remote Surgery :) and actually this distribution saved us when my parallel output was burned by an electric shock coming back from the robot solenoids, and we separated the process into two laptops.

Tal built computer-controlled, solenoids fingers that matched the fret board and strings in the game. Getting the fingers to press the fret buttons and hit the strum correctly was the hard part.

Tal took a storeroom mannequin and positioned the arms to hold the guitar. But the arms couldn’t be put in the right position, so he had to break and glue them to hold the guitar right. All the robot wiring is inside the mannequin ending at a control panel on the back of its neck.

This first public demonstration of GuitarHeroNoid received a rock star ovation from the ultra-geek audience. We also prepared a multiplayer mode, so you can play against the robot. Pushing the envelope higher, maybe next year we will build a robot that plays the game “dance dance revolution” (known as Dancing Stage in Europe).

Now how about "Real Pacman"?

The Real Pac Man (Tal Chalozin, Niv Efron) main idea was to build some old school tech symbol using as much nowadays-technologies as we can find. Right away we knew that we want a large scale game that will give the feeling of the "PacMan come to life..."
The game board made of a projector mounted on a stand, projecting a 15-square-meters game board on the floor. The PacMan was a wireless Pac-look-a-like robot which "drives" over a game board, equipped by RFID reader, Bluetooth transceiver controlled by ATMEL microcontroller, riding on a game board marked with RFID tags.
At the button of the PacMan there is an RFID reader that reads the tag location and sends it back to the game "engine". The game engine is a java game we hacked, running on a laptop computer.

The result is that you are playing with a completely realistic PacMan over a full virtual game board, but they communicate as if they are one.

To make it more useless tech powered, we've written a J2ME application running on a cellular phone for controlling the PacMan. So, instead of playing with the laptop keyboard, you play the game on your cell, which sends via Bluetooth the control commands.
The next step is to make it a multiplayer, PacMan and ghosts...

Pac Man does not get anymore realistic than that!

All around the room were screens and gaming consoles and a hydraulic driving simulator, so you could just sit down and rumble. At the center of the gaming room there were two home made arcade tables, one crafted by Davidi Silberstein and the other by Amit Jurgenson, both musicians, handy-men and old-school gamers.

Arcade Machine Quest and Amit's Arcade Machine

And the hydraulic driving simulator?

Power tool drag racing took place inside a large and crowded tent. Crossing the middle of the tent, were two long wooden strip tracks in which the racers ran, dragging their electricity cables behind them. The race judges where Michael Shiloh, co-founder of MakingThings and an annual participant of drag racing, World class notorious hacker Pablos Holman who breaks and builds new technologies and Eyal Gever with the "from a designer perspective" opinion.

Image on the right: Vladimir's Warm vs. Shy Vardi's Spider (photo: Yaniv Golan)

Of course, the fastest racers were the ones Michael and Pablos brought. Michael had Jim Mason's blazing fast "monorail" that runs as a monorail train on top of one of the sides of the track, and Pablos had borrowed an "Old Killdoggie" model racer, which is a modified grinder with inline-skate wheels. But getting first to the end of the track is not the goal of such a race.

At least half of the races were built by Yedidya (Didi) Vardi and his crew. Didi, a junk collector, designer of hands-on science models and screws-and-bolts seller. On Didi's team were Shy Vardi, Vladimir Zviagintsev an aircraft engineer, who built the kites that were raised to thousands of feet in height, and Shlomo Abayoff.

Babylon Tower Racer was built by the GarageGeeks Zvika Netter, Yuval Tal, Ohad Pressman, Gil Hirsch and Tal Chalozin. A laptop sitting on a wagon with electric lawnmower wheels, motivated to move forward by SMS sent by the audience to Yuval’s phone number. Each time an SMS arrived, the light blob was blinked the message in morse code, and a Text-to-Speech algorithm announced the message using the racer's speakers.

More racers such as the bottle Xylophone, playing on bottles set at the sides of the track, containing various amount of water for different tones. A CleanTech racer that needed no electricity but the moments of falling parts, Vacuuming Hovercraft, Skateboard Ventilator, and Parking, which actually did park most of the time and didn't finish the race.

Crocodile "rocket" Handy by Naama, Achi and Yariv

KinnerNet looks like a hell of fun. Why is the number of participants limited to 150?
Are there like-minded events in the country during the rest of the year?

KinnerNet is a a lot of fun and in order to participate, you have to contribute and not act as a "camp potato". I guess that the number is limited because only super geeks are invited. Since there are many people who wish to share and expand their connections, forks of miscellaneous camps and events are being formed. For example, GeekCon, EureKamp, and even us, the GarageGeeks are hosting (images) content evenings, barbeques and Gaming Lan Parties (images.)

I saw on the programme that there was some place dedicated to digital art? What happened there? Any good work you'd like to highlight?

I think digital art was everywhere. In the evening we all gathered in the dining room and watched videos prepared by participants. Michal Levy, for example, a saxophonist and graphic designer, presented a beautiful visual interpretation that she made for John Coltrane's Giant Steps.

We were asked to bring from home any junk we don’t need anymore and Hanoch Piven hosted a face making workshop that was one of the most popular happenings. Hanoch has been making collages with objects - mainly illustrations of faces for magazines and newspapers since 1992.

The GraffitiPrinter

Ariel Schlesinger, presented his GraffitiPrinter, a handheld printer, feed from punch card that translates to spray writing on the wall.

Inside a large room, Ezri Tarazi along with the creative industrial designers Maayan Hagar and Yasmin Yotam, and anyone who wished to help, built a chain reaction sculpture called a machine that does something that does something.
Next to that sculpture, and the Superman Simulator, Didi Vardi presented his Vibrating Laser Balls Organ, a 400 pound golf-ball-and-aluminum Stradivarius, a wonderful, real musical instrument inspired by the Animusic's virtual Pipe Dream. (video)

I'm also very curious about the Cooking Madness event. Was there anything edible there? What does "Cotton Candy with ambient touch" taste like for example?

Cooking Madness was more than edible all right. As you cannot be in all of the activities, I didn’t get the chance to taste that Fluffy Clouds Cotton Candy. But I ate two pieces from Tal's mother’s terrific passion fruit cheese cake, which was introduced by 3 Powerpoint slides at the camp's first gathering. Most of the time I stood next to Yuval Tal who prepared the Extra alcoholic chocolate drink, and verified the quality of the cocktail.

At night, things were getting weirder, people juggling, geeks playing arcades or fighting each other with light sabres, and Vladimir, inspired by The Burning Man Project, was riding a bicycle while dragging another bicycle with a burning doll, which was created earlier by Didi's team.

I’d like to finish by send a enormous thanks and hugs to anyone who helped in the great 2007 KinnerNet event and also thank Yaniv Golan and Alex Sirota for the photos.

Thanks Rafael!

A last tip from Rafael: Gil Rimon and Lior Katz's Supermarket 2.0 parody (video.)

More images at Flickr tag KinnerNet2007. Photo of GuitarHeroNoid by Yaniv Golan. More images.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by michael on Apr 7, 2007, 8:10AM

BusinessWeek carries an interesting feature on motion and gesture technologies in its latest edition. The article ties together threads that have been ongoing in the area of gesture-controlled media and interfaces (particularly in the area of advertising), motion capture for film and games, and new innovations such as multi-touch, which has gotten hot since the announcement of the iPhone.

Of course, most folks are all excited about the applications in marketing, such as with the interactive ads from adidas and Target the article describes. Less talked about but more interesting in the long-term are public infrastructure uses for gestural interfaces. Imagine being able to use a gestural interface to find your way around a foreign city or airport, based on your own orientation, not that of a flat map (could have used this when I went to Switzerland and back recently - the Geneva tram maps were a pain to understand to me). Or in public health care environments (show the doctor where it hurts, particularly if its inside - a first step before a costly MRI to locate a problem in 3D space). Or in museums (flick through a catalog of art, skip along a timeline, or explore an ancient building).

More and more, interface designers are looking at how to use gestural control to get around issues of literacy and language, and also age and ability. Most of us can point, and move an object to find another. Hopefully interface designers looking into this area will get together more often with information designers to collaborate on projects such as those I mention above. 

Originally from Smartspace by Scott Smith reBlogged by michael on Mar 26, 2007, 2:30PM

A prominent motif at the Pulse art fair in NYC last week, pixelation was evident in a number of works in various mediums. From afar, these works can be read as a whole, but close up, the image starts to break down and the individual elements of the composition become more dominant. Here are a selection of some of our favorites. Click on any of the images for a more detailed view.

The buzz around the Catherine Clark Gallery booth had a lot to do with "The Morning After Portraits" by Andy Diaz Hope. Made of gel-caps, the series shows images of people in front of their medicine cabinets or in their local pharmacies with hangovers, headaches and other illnesses self-inflicted or otherwise. (Pictured above right.) A more literal comment on our pill-popping culture than Damien Hirst's similar work, Hope comments, "We are no longer a sum of our natural history, but a sum of our natural history plus our self selected recreational and medical regimes."

At first glance, the installation by Devorah Sperber presented by the Marcia Wood Gallery, looks like randomly arranged different colored spools of thread. However, a clear acrylic sphere placed in front of the work shrinks and condenses the thread spool "pixels" into an easily-read image of a masterpiece—in this case Vermeer's "Girl With a Pearl Earring"—and the convex shape flips the imagery 180 degrees. A mimicry of how the brain and eye process visual data, Sperber's work plays with ideas about the past, craft, visual theories and art itself. Check out more of her work at the Brooklyn Museum until 6 May 2007.

Referencing cubists like Picasso and other early 20th-century painters, Isidro Blasco, recently exhibited at DCKT Contemporary, turns the 2-dimensional media of photography into a 3-dimensional experience by piecing together multiple photos. Using board-mounted photographs, he combines multiple angles and architecture to explore perception in relation to physical experience. Blasco's sculptures draw the observer into the piece, so that the experience of it feels new rather than a straight portrayal of the scene. The photographic sculpture pictured (right), "Side Building," measures 107 x 120 x 72 inches . See more of his work here.

More of a dot-matrix than pixels, William Betts of the Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, NM, re-creates surveillance camera images by carefully dripping acrylic paint onto canvas. Using digital information, he creates work that is abstract, organic and realistic. Again, a macro view (above right) becomes an abstraction but a step back (above left) reveals a realistic surveillance camera shot. Also on Cool Hunting, Betts' work from last years Scope art fair uses digital information (and in this case techniques) to create graphics. See more from this series of work here.

Carlos Estrada-Vega, presented by Margaret Thatcher Projects, exhibited sculptural works made of small canvas-covered blocks. Estrada-Vega considers each square as its own distinct painting, hence show titles like, "4000 Paintings/14 Compositions." Given the modularity of the pixel-like pieces (they're attached with magnets), the mini-paintings have the potential to be rearranged infinitely into new compositions. The colors, inspired by the artist’s Mexican heritage, look somewhat monochromatic from afar. Only up close do the ultra-saturated colors reveal themselves, an aspect further accentuated by the topographic nature of the blocks. Maceo (far left) is composed of wax, oleopasto, oil, limestone and pigment on canvas and measures 18 x 18 inches. More effective in person, these photos do not do the works much justice.

Originally from Cool Hunting by Tim Yu reBlogged by michael on Mar 1, 2007, 9:07PM