Soap in the Microwave

Watch what happens when you put a bar of Ivory soap in the microwave for two minutes.

Motorized Boxes

A short film by Beryl Sokoloff featuring the work of Crista Grauer with music by Jason Huff.

Electrochemical Synthesiser; (direct audio recording) by Pask Present

Video recorded using direct audio out (rather than microphone and speaker/amp). The sounds are produced by an electrochemical reaction between Aluminium, Copper and Salt water (NaCl), fed through a pre-amp after basic filtering via a capacitor and resistor.

Pressing a key causes salt solution to flow over a copper and aluminium connection generating a low signal which is filtered by a capacitor and then amplified, creating a complex white noise, with poignant fluctuating oscillations.

The device demonstrates how complexity can be generated using simple analogue and wet components.


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Aaron Edsinger Introduces us to Robot Domo

Roboticist Aaron Edsinger is working on bringing robots to market that don't require a manual. Domo learns to adapt to his environment and has the ability to put stuff on shelves.

Here, Aaron shows how his love of making art-robots led him to his greatest creation; Domo, a humanoid robot that adapts to objects and naturally interacts.



Heaps more videos an info here.

Wind Gizmos by Arturo Chicano

Video of various kite type gizmos rolling around in the wind.

Jerry Marotta and Tom Griesgraber Performing

In a step





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iHologram: an Unreal application for the iPhone/iTouch from David OReily

David OReily is without a question a skilled animator as is evident by his splash screen intro of his website.

He is currently exhibiting a cutting edge application for the iPhone/iTouch which gives the illusion of a 3D image jumping off the screen. as is illustrated on the image seen here to the right.

The application (iHologram) works by assuming a constant viewing angle (35-45degrees), typical for when the device is placed on a tabletop. The 3D scene's perspective is warped using anamorphosis, the same technique used in Hans Holbein's painting The Ambassadors. This application does the exact same but updates dynamically.

David OReily discovered some poignant aspects of human brain visual interpretaion in relation to creating this remarkable application.Firstly, that there exists an average angle of view that we are most comfortable with whilst viewing motion on the iPhone (35-45 degrees).
Secondly he discovered a Rotating Grid Illusion in that a large grid seen rotating at a certain speed will appear to group itself into smaller grids, spinning independently.

He put those ideas together with how the iPhone/iTouch uses an Accelerometer and a Gyroscope which assists in viewing content on the device whilst rotating it.

Luthier Andy Manson Creates the Mermaid Guitar

(luthier is a maker of stringed instruments such as violins or guitars)

Andy Manson, a luthier from Great Britain has built a sculptural guitar, of a mermaid onwhich he plays Siren Song in this video.

The original idea for this piece was the life size representation of a human as the resonating body of a musical instrument, the guitar frequently being compared with the female form,

The Mermaid Guitar is a fully functioning and playable life size musical sculpture. It is entirely hollow, weighing 9 lbs, built using state of the art contemporary guitar making technique and materials. The instrument and it's case took three years to construct using 19 different types of wood.

I'm trying to comprehend the meaning of this Mermaids appeareance, like when did you ever see a physical rendition of a Mermaid on its knees with its head tilted back with an open mouth ?

UFO

New York artist Peter Coffin with the collaborative assistance of Cinimod Studio (a lighting design company) built this UFO for the visitors of Gdansk Festival of Stars in Poland.

The UFO flew in along the coast from the nearby town of Sopot, and then circled the centre of Gdansk. The UFO made its startling and surprising appearance soon after sunset. It appeared to be covered in lights displaying a series of geometric colour patterns.

The overall UFO structure is 7 metres in diameter and manufactured of aluminum for lightness. 3000 bright and individually controllable Color Kinetics LED nodes have been arrayed across the structure and are controlled via a solid state computer. An on board 6 kw generator provides the system power, and the overall UFO can be remotely controlled via SMS messaging.


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Ben Nelson's electric motorcycle does 300mpg

Ben Nelson bought a motorcycle for $100 and swapped out the original engine for a Briggs and Stratton 8HP DC motor he picked up on eBay for $500, using four $160 Optima Yellowtop lead-acid batteries for power.

Ben says it goes from zero to 45mph in 5 seconds and has a range of about 20 miles before it needs a recharge. Hear how quiet it is on the road in this video.

More motorcyles Ben has built can be seen here, and or more details about other eco-modding can be found here.


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Mark Jenkins: Street Installations

Mark Jenkins does transparent tape sculptures of man made items and figures in both natural and in urban situations. Watch a slide show video of his temporal works here. A street level observer of his work has commented that his sculptures

are at first invisible to passers-by and only register as art installations when you at the second glance actually see them. The surprise effect of finding an installed/embedded piece of art which appeared over night in your neighbourhood is what makes these installations valuable and fun.

He has said that visiting a Juan Muñoz exhibition in 2001 inspired him to start doing street installations using a casting technique that he came upon as a child and later developed while living in Rio de Janeiro.

I was teaching English in Rio de Janeiro and had a lot of downtime between classes. One afternoon I’d made a large tinfoil ball, just to have something to play catch with while lying on the sofa. I decided to make a second one out of tape, but there wasn’t enough left on the roll to do it. The trick I’d figured out as a kid popped back into my head, and I cast the tinfoil ball with the tape. I was impressed with the results and decided to do a coffee pot. A couple months later, I’d gone through several hundred rolls, casting everything in my flat, including myself. The walls were thin in my apartment building, and my neighbors weren’t too thrilled at the sounds of packing tape spinning off the roll all night and day. One annoyed neighbor threw mud at my clothes drying on the window ledge, but I couldn’t be stopped.

Reference

Slitscan memory by Green Eyed Zero

Rachel Pollard and Sebastien Valade created this video with Processing software and use it in their live performance of; In the shadow of picture frames.

Green eyed zero integrate contemporary circus, physical theatre, and new media arts into a mix of circus skills, ranging from dynamic aerial and acrobatics, to intimate juggling and manipulation work culminating in a visual spectacle through live performance and video projection.


Reference

Japanese Paper Craft: Gears Cube

Intriguing interactive jigsaw puzzle craft, (video).

More examples, here.

Scientists Bio-engineer Robot with living rat brain cells

Brain tissue cultured from rats has controlled a wheeled robot around a lab, according to New Scientist this week (video). Researchers in the UK have harnessed signals from thousands of disembodied rat neurons, and manipulated them to get a robot to respond to instructions.

This is no ordinary robot control system - a plain old microchip connected to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made - and continue to make - connections with each other. As they do so, the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature.

The team at the University of Reading in the UK hope their research will help provide treatments for diseases like Alzheimer’s and epilepsy.

Beardyman; Cooking Us Up Some Tasty Beats

Beatboxing: The art of producing drum beats, rhythm, and musical sounds using one's mouth, lips, tongue, voice, nasal passage and throat.

Here, Beardyman is showing us how to cook up some tasty beats!

Boingboingtv's UK-based music correspondent Russell Porter interviewed Beardyman here.

VisionAire: Making interactive virtual presentations possible

Obscura Digital has released a video of a new technology referred to as a a multi-touch hologram. They call it VisionAire and its a new way to allow a presenter to interface with visual data. By using a mixture of multi touch software and the Musion Eyeliner Hologram Effect a user drags a number of virtual images in mid air, using multi touch technology, and throws them around while also having the option to zoom in and out of the images by using hand gestures while effectively grabbing the floating image.

According to the company:

Musion Eyeliner uses a specially developed foil that reflects images from high definition video projectors, making it possible to produce virtual images of variable sizes and incredible clarity, using industry standard software. Infinitely configurable, the virtual picture appears within a stage set, while the position of the projection is invisible to the audience.

This video shows a man interacting with holographic images projected before him, moving them around and resizing them much as you would on the iPhone or Microsoft's Surface except that all the images are projected in the air.


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Liquiddust presents slow motion

This is a music video to the song slow-motion by the band liquiddust.

9: A Dark Animated Short Sci Fi by Shane Acker

This animator manages to instill feelings for the characters within the viewer, and without dialogue. The story of the animation is about zippered ragdoll creatures, of which there are nine, are being eliminated one by one by a creature which is craftily assembled from various junkyard parts until only 9 is left to defend itself, lest it be next to be eliminated.

Shane Acker in an interview has said

Inspired by the work of stop motion animation masters Jan Svankmeyer, The Brothers Quay and the Lauenstein Brothers, I sought to immerse the audience in gritty textural world inhabited by creatures composed of fabric scraps and bits of broken machinery.The fantasy artwork of Zdzislaw Beksinski and photographs of European cities destroyed in World War II inspired the scenic design.The non-verbal narrative is loosely based on the old English Poem Beowulf, and relies heavily on pantomime, combined with strong composition and staging to tell the story.

This animation is a pilot for a feature movie presently being made and its release is mooted for December 2008. See his website for more.

Young girl attempts personality abreaction

in the video

I was a fetus once

Abreaction is a psychoanalytical term for reliving an experience in order to purge it of its emotional excesses; a type of catharsis. Sometimes it is a method of becoming conscious of repressed traumatic events.

The song in the video is Delicious Demon by the Sugarcubes.

Sweet Pain by Vishal Vaid and Karsh Kale Ensemble

Vishal Vaid and Karsh Kale Ensemble

asserts a song of modern ecstatic sufi music

Sweet Pain

from A Tribute to Nusrat at Makor, NYC.



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viewzi: New Visual Cloud Search Engine

viewzi, is a whole new way to experience searching on the internets. Instead of one big list, you get clear visual views tailored for the content you are looking for, watch the introductory video's on the site to see how this works.

viewzi is a visual search engine that animatedly offers the user several types of search window interfaces. Instead of taking a machine approach to search results, Viewzi provides it’s users 2 dozen or so interpretations or “views” of your query.

If you’re doing a search for say David Byrne, Viewzi will present you with an MP3 view, an album view, a news view, and multiple versions of a photo view, among many other views.

This search engine is a seductive approach to searching and while it offers multiple views of individual searches, I'm certain that one would consume a lot of time just viewing the results. The mp3's view is the most startling since it seems just about any word , words or phrase will offer up a range of possible playback previews.


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A Tour of Clayton Bailey's Robot Art Compound

Clayton Bailey has made approximately 100 life-size robot sculptures of found objects since 1976. His interest in robots was inspired by the armoury of the fifteenth century, (Video).

He searches the local flea markets and scrap metal yards for discarded home appliances, cookware, bicycle and automobile parts. He carefully grafts the parts together into new forms; reincarnating them as robot sculptures. His family of robot sculptures range from the humanoid to the pet dog or exotic bird or insect. They don't walk around and break your china and endanger your art collection. They are static; they stand still and blink their lights.

I'm particularly baffled by how the fire powered radio telescope (similar to one that Leornado da Vinci owned) creates the illusion of being able to see thru your hand. Check out what Clayton is working on today.

Take a peak at the future of 3D Television Broadcasting

This video reveals some of the latest computer science research into taking television broadcasting in to a 3D future by enabling the viewer to see three-dimensional images of the subject content from any angle they choose.

The University of Warwick multi-camera television studio has 48 digital video cameras, but the most peculiar aspect is that they all seem to be parked within a wall of black cloth !


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Interactive Toys with Anastasia Ward

Rocketboom field correspondent Chuck Olsen of mnstories interviews interactive toy sculpture artist Anastasia Ward.

3D Reproduction for Everyone

Shapeways, a new online rapid-prototyping service allows users to upload digital designs which are then printed on 3-D printers and shipped back. The service gives small businesses, designers, artists, and hobbyists access to prototyping tools that were once available only to the largest corporations. The fee for a typical printed object is $50-$150. Their video shows the steps behind the process.

Considering that 3D printing machines typically cost over $10,000, this is great news for independent concept artists and anyone who just needs a few physical models of their designs. To print objects in 3D, Shapeway's machines use a mixture of different polymers, sprayed in several layers, until the specified thickness of each part of a design is matched. All you have to do is sign up and start building a portfolio of your designs on Shapeway's site, and then, if you want something printed, your model will be shipped back to you within 10 days of you ordering it.


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AirCoreVortex Fountain Sculpture illudes a mass of water transcending materiality

This fountain sculpture is known as ‘Charybdis’ and is located in Seaham Hall, Sunderland (UK) is designed by William Pye, the Charybdis fountain is his largest vortex water sculpture to date, .

The sirens Charybdis and Scylla resided in the Sicilian Sea. Homer tells us that because Charybdis had stolen the oxen of Hercules, Zeus struck her with a thunderbolt and changed her into a whirlpool whose vortex swallowed up ships. In Charybdis the circular movement of water inside a transparent acrylic cylinder forms an air-core vortex in the centre. Steps wrap around the cylinder and allow spectators to view the vortex from above. The cylinder was manufactured in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Not surprisingly the fountain also relies on a heavy-duty water filtration system which is necessary to keep the vortex clean and spinning properly

Watch the writhing motion of water swirling about in an air core vortex in this sumptious phenomenal fountain sculpture as a downloadable and/or viewable video.



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Its Only Ones and 0's by Geoff Smith

Geoff Smith a well known composer/musician recently penned this song Ones and 0's as an empathetic response to bloggers who sometimes receive rude and unwaranted comments on their blogs. Cali Lewis from Geek Brief featured this song on her 401th podcast stating that she loved the idea of confronting mean, inappropriate comments with music.


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