Weather Wizard: Artist Creates Little Clouds Indoors. Artist Berndnaut Smilde can create little clouds indoors without the use of a magic weather-controlling device. Unless a thermostat, humidifier, and fog machine count, in which case he does. *cranking thermostat* It's gonna be a scorcher today! Impressive Berndnaut, but I've been making indoor clouds for years now. "Prove it. " *wafting* Give it a second -- you'll smell it. Hit the jump for several more clouds on brief display (they don't last long!) At a gallery. Artist's Website viaBerndnaut Smilde [itsthatnice] Thanks to Audrey, who claims she can make little indoor suns. Berndnaut Smilde. How is it that the Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde could create a cloud in a room? I can’t tell you, the artist defies categorisation let alone an explanation. Often drawing on a nebulous concept of the “physical presence of transitional spaces,” on one hand Nimbus and Cumulus – the former appearing in the online gallery Probe, the latter (pictured) was visible for mere minutes at HMK {Hotel MariaKapel} earlier this month) are sculptural; no matter how vague, when a physicality is suggested, it occupies that space specifically.
On the other, it can only be experienced through documentation and photography but whatever it is, it’s pretty special. A Chandelier That Recreates Sunset In London, Or An Afternoon in Tel Aviv. Markus Kayser, like so many humans before him, is fascinated by the sun. The 28-year-old German has made a name for himself designing objects that harness, or mimic, the flaming star at the center of our solar system.
For example, the project that launched Kayser’s career, Solar Sinter, used a solar-powered 3D printer to shape objects from sand in the Egyptian desert (the video has more than 60,000 views on YouTube). At the opening of Design Miami/Basel on Monday, Kayser introduced LIGHTzeit, another project based on the effects of the sun. But unlike Solar Sinter, LIGHTzeit seeks to recreate natural light in an indoor setting, artificially. Commissioned by W Hotels as part of their Designer of the Future Award, Kayser’s chandelier looks like a humble fluorescent tube mounted on a rotating fixture.
There’s also a geographic component to the piece. “Most artificial light sources are entirely static,” explains the designer in a brief. The light be on view until June 17th. They're Real: Crazy Daredevil Robots That Fly, Build, And Make Their Own Decisions. We all know that our military is deploying UAVs to drop bombs without deploying manned fighter jets, but in a world where flying robots are a reality, could we be using this technology to build rather than destroy? Could we save lives rather than take them?
In a most visually impressive TED talk, GRASP Labs’ Vijay Kumar, who we’ve featured before, shares everything that he and his colleagues are doing with tiny, quadrotor robots. When you get a few minutes into the clip, you’ll realize these robots don’t just float as lumbering chunks of metal that could fall from the sky at any second. They’re smart stunt copters, pulling tight turns that push two Gs and somersaulting through tight gaps, thanks to the help of onboard accelerometers and some brilliant AI. You can even throw these robots like a baseball, and they’ll stabilize themselves in midair--like a flying Segway. It’s a familiar theme, these quadrotor robot builders. The implications are wild, to say the least. [Hat tip: archdaily]
5 Traps You Have To Avoid When Pitching Bold Ideas. Innovation is not a science. Much of it has the elusive qualities of art, dressed up as useful things. But business leaders continue to try and invest in innovation as if it were a science. And too often, the designers they employ as consultants engage with these leaders not only as if it were an art but also as if their clients understood how to speak in “creative” terms.
So we find these two parties speaking different languages, in need of a translator. And as often happens in translation, important context or nuance can be lost. My experience leading Frog, a 1,000-person global creative organization, for 18 years, has left me with a few key insights about how the creative industry needs to improve its communication with its corporate clients. Here are five reasons why creatives need to improve how we interface with executives. Seeing the Problem Through the Client’s Eyes Finding the Lens Your Client Is Looking Through Staying at the Negotiating Table Talking In The Abstract. 9 | A Captivating Mechanical Cloud That Tells The Weather.
You know what some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers are doing right now? Decoding genomes? Sure. Working on top secret research for U.S. military forces? Probably. But what about just forecasting the weather? Yet how do we experience the weather forecast? This simplification clearly drives James Leng a little crazy, so he created Point Cloud, the antithesis of the old sun wearing sunglasses. “Cloud performs the data, dynamically shifting between stability and turbulence, expansion and contraction. Obviously, Point Cloud can’t work in our weather forecasts.
[Hat tip: Creative Applications] 'Point Cloud' - #Arduino controlled structure by James Leng breathes weather data. Created by James Leng, Point Cloud is an attempt to re-imagine our daily interaction with weather data. Even with the modern scientific and technological developments related to weather and when we can deploy sophisticated monitoring devices to document and observe weather, our analysis and understanding of meteorology is still largely approximate.
Weather continues to surprise us and elude our best attempts to predict, control, and harness the various elements. Point Cloud builds on this premise, exploring new ways to interpret and understand weather data. Weather has always had a unique place in our lives, because it has a multiplicity that encompasses both the concrete and the indeterminate.
It is the intangible context within which we build our lives and our cities, but it is also the physical element against which we create protective shelter. Point Cloud is a sculptural form defined by a thin wire mesh, driven asynchronously by 8 individual servos controlled via Arduino. (Slide 7) | Instagram Filters? Pfff. InstaCRT Transforms Pics Using An Ancient TV. I resisted Instagram for a long time, preferring the unpredictability of real, expired disposable cameras. Eventually, I broke down--and it’s gotten too forget all that was lost in the process. My photos are predictable, lacking the light leaks and plasticized blur of a crappy analog camera. There’s no longer anything unique about what I photograph than what I actually photograph. Given all that, I’m not exactly sure how to take InstaCRT.
It’s a $2 iPhone app that adds a retro look to your photos. InstaCRT is built on 80s electronics that might blow up and make the app useless. Am I being parodied or enabled? So Ström and friends built InstaCRT as a hack, a sort of proof of ridiculous concept. Some of InstaCRT’s reviews in the App Store complain of long wait times, and that’s almost to be expected. Ström isn’t so surprised. Whereas Instagram made the everyday person appreciate toy camera photography, InstaCRT has me captivated by the digital. Download it here. Re:publica 2012 analogue @twitter wall by Precious - 38,378 printed tweets (@preciousforever) For re:publica, one of Europe’s largest conferences about social media, blogging and the digital society, Precious design studio created an analogue twitter wall to deter visitors from their usual stares at the digital screens by bringing the virtual to the physical space and creating action around it.
During the course of 3 days a total of 38,378 tweets appeared on the wall. Printing out tweets and pasting them on a wall was one of the first ideas they had. It also inspired everything else they developed for the conference – signage, video trailer, stage design etc. The 14 x 3 meter scaffolding construction was erected in the central area of the location to become “live” twitter coverage on layers of A4 printed paper. Even though everything worked out as planned, there was something beyond their control: the reactions of 4000 attendees.
Using Node.js + nTwitter the team listened to Twitters Streaming API and collected all tweets with the conference hashtag #rp12. Project Page. The Immortal by Revital Cohen - Life-support machines modified to 'breathe' in a closed circuit. A number of life-support machines are connected to each other, circulating liquids and air in attempt to mimic a biological structure. This is an installation by Revital Cohen who modified and connected organ replacement machines together to have them ‘breathe’ in a closed circuit. The Immortal project investigates human dependence on electronics, the desire to make machines replicate organisms and our perception of anatomy as reflected by biomedical engineering. I first came across this installation on Régine’s wmmna blog few weeks ago followed by Revital’s interview by Régine on ResonanceFM. Through some considerable modifications, Revital managed to connect heart-lung machine, a dialysis machine, an infant incubator, a mechanical mentilator and an intraoperative cell salvage machine to keep each other alive through circulation of electrical impulses, oxygen and artificial blood – thus create a living machine.
Project Page /via wmmna. Audio-Powered City Map Enables Geolocated Eavesdropping. GPS maps are a remarkable invention on their own, but when coupled with satellite photography and tech like Google’s Street View, they enable us to see anywhere. It’s unbelievable, when you fathom the true scope of it all. But even still, these perspectives are limited to only one sense: sight. Listen Here! Is a concept by Nicola Hume that allows a map to be heard. It’s an interactive guide that visitors explore with a stethoscope. (Technically, the stethoscope is just for show. It’s a brilliant idea. But as a less free-spirited, civically organized tool it’s just as interesting. In other words, it is time for us all to take the reins of covert ops, to hide microphones under one another’s seats and just wait for the hilarity to ensue.