Archive for the 'technology' Category
An interactive animation of Starry Night
I love this interactive animation of Van Gogh’s Starry Night! Made by Petros Vrellis with openFrameworks it imagines the energy flows in the painting and offers the ability to change them with touch-sensitive gestures. These also change the ambient background music.
(via Colossal)
Interactive Kinect Puppets
Shortly after the Kinect was launched in late 2010 Emily Gobeille and Theo Watson from Design I/O used it make a quick interactive puppet protoype by skeleton tracking on an arm. Their updated 2.0 installation above, Puppet Parade, looks great fun, allowing
children to use their arms to puppeteer larger than life creatures projected on the wall in front of them. Children can also step in to the environment and interact with the puppets directly, petting them or making food for them to eat. This dual interactive setup allows children to perform alongside the puppets, blurring the line between the ‘audience’ and the puppeteers and creating an endlessly playful dialogue between the children in the space and the children puppeteering the creatures.
The unedited clip where it is easier to see the movements in more focus is also interesting. Although these are made differently they share some qualities with Philip Worthington’s earlier Shadow Monsters.
Some thoughts on 3D printing and the arts
If you want to blow your mind, take a journey into the revolutionary realm of 3D printing. Rapid prototyping has been around for about 20 years, but 3D printing seems now to be quickly becoming a viable manufacturing process for a wide range of materials and objects. There are lots of examples, of which the following are only a small selection:
- Reproduce yourself with a 3D printer - the reporter’s head is scanned and printed as a small model. The printers he shows can print in paper, resin and plastic.
- bioprinting ears, skin, cartilege, tissue, bone, organs, teeth, ultrasound images
- chocolate, sugar and other food
- glass, ceramic, foam, concrete, plaster, wood
- metals, silver, titanium
- tools, shoes, musical instruments. models (what about guns - scary thought!)
- souvenirs of yourself
- clones - the use of this for replica bridal dolls cracks me up!
- art, puppets
- Solar sinter project – printing sand into glass in the desert by Markus Kayser
Like other disruptive technology, 3D printing looks as if it will follow the path of offering the ability to decentralize and customise, and to make unique things cost effectively.
It’s interesting to consider what impact this is already having and going to have on artists and how they make things, as it becomes mainstream. Imagine, we can digitally sculpt or scan something in 3D (or photograph it, send the photos to somewhere like Photofly to get them stitched into a 3D scan), then send the files to a fabricator or perhaps even our own 3D printer , and there it is. There is the obvious debate between new and old, manufactured and handmade, and whether quality will be enhanced or compromised. Most likely 3D printing will become an additional useful tool for some processes, components and items, and competency in these technologies will become more expected in the arts industry. And, entirely handmade is likely to become rarer but more valuable.
Being John Malkovich via real-time facial recognition
Anyone involved in puppetry in any way knows that the first question you get asked is ‘So, have you seen that movie Being John Malkovich?” Here’s a system where you can control the face of someone else – even John Malcovich – using facial recognition in realtime via a webcam.
Puzzling over twitter app tweet preferencing
Why do the Twitterific, Twitter for Mac and Twitter for iPhone apps preference against tweets in the recent past? For example, if I want to catch up with what’s happened overnight – the US day – the feed has a gap in it jumping from, say, 3 hours ago to 16 hours ago. The Twitter for iPhone app lets you load more into the gap, but it’s not ideal.
It’s not as if I want to necessarily read all of those tweets, I’m quite happy to fish what I want out of the passing river of news, and let the rest go. And it’s not that I’m not comfortable with the philosophy that if something important has happened the river will deliver it a number of times over. What I don’t understand is why the apps choose not to just let the river flow past me. What possible reason is there to preference tweets from 16 hours or a few days ago over what happened in the last 10 hours?
LetterMPress: letterpress app for iPad
I imagine a large part of the attraction of letterpress printing is to do with the physical handling of the type, and it being a hands-on process. But the argument made by designer John Bonadies for LetterMPress, a proposed virtual letterpress app iPad, is that it will ’give designers, artists, students, lovers of type—anyone—the ability to produce their own authentic letterpress designs and artwork’ when wood type and vintage cuts have become sought after and rare.
I’m not sure if letterpress artists and printers will regard this as encouraging the preservation and recognition of the aesthetic qualities of letterpress, or as an undermining of the art. But it looks like an app I would find attractive.
(via Laughing Squid)
And now, a giant robotic sock puppet!
Mr Weekend is a giant (4.5 metre tall) robotic sock puppet made by Michael Simi. He is fashioned over a large mechanical hand from a defunct Michigan car factory and is having some difficulty adjusting to his change of job into the art world…
(via @JudexJones)
Puppet Warp in PhotoShop
A new feature in PhotoShop called Puppet Warp will enable manipulation of an object, or parts of an image, by using an overlayed mesh and control pins.
Visual musing on rrsCloud
I spent a little time this morning playing with the idea of rssCloud being represented by a merging of the rss icon with a Chinese cloud.
