Face-mounted Lucid Dreaming Mask

This one's almost too straight out of a cyberpunk story to actually be believable. Some kid has designed, built, and put up a how-to on a device that causes its wearer to have lucid dreams:

"When I first started reading about lucid dreaming, I found that some companies had created expensive pieces of technology aimed at increasing your likelihood of having a lucid dream when you wear it to sleep. I wanted one, but at the price of $200 they did not look so promising.

Thus, I decided to go in search of how to make my own lucid dreaming mask."

Basically, the device is a bit of headgear that keeps a pair of LEDs pointed right at your eyes. Its PIC waits a few hours after you've fallen asleep and then starts flashing the lights rhythmically. The idea is to wake you up just enough to give you control of the dream.

Great use of just a tiny little bit of tech to accomplish a good lump of self-experimentation.

(via Make)

Frank Lloyd Wright in Half Life 2

Someone's used the Half-Life engine to create a tour of probably the single most famous american architectural landmark: Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater:



(YouTube link)

Found via City of Sound who has some interesting insight on the subject.

Have you ever built anything in a digital world? Seems like a more and more important skill for the aspiring computerkrafstman these days. . .

Self-clone

Artist Bert Simmons is using digital modeling and paper craft to "clone" himself:

"Since a while I am in my midlife crisis, thinking a lot about the purpose of my life, what will remain and things like that. Since I don't have a specific talent to make my mark nor even managed to arrange some kids to reflect my existence or even have a beloved one that will never forget me I guess I am just one of many who just will be forgotten..That sucks, but instead of endulging my self into depression I desperatly started looking for a solution and I came up with this idea..."

He's got pretty detailed step-by-step instructions about how he did it on his website. Useful for anyone intersted in printing for 3d assembly.

WATSCHENDISKURS ("Face-slapping discourse")

WATSCHENDISKURS, or "face-slapping discource" is another project by Uli Winters, one of the artists behind the previously discussed Byte. This time Winters is collaborating with Frank Fietzek on a project for Art Bots, "an international art exhibition for robotic art and art-making robot". Here's the story:

"The two puppets of WATSCHENDISKURS ("Face-slapping discourse") are involved in a discussion about language theory. Like in many a real life discussion they pick their phrases randomly from a pool of more or less witty statements on the topic of language including Wittgenstein-Quotes and Russian weather proverbs. From time to time this discussion gets pretty emotional, and at a point where words no longer seem to be the right tool of convincing the other one, the frog and the cat lose their temper. A slap in the face stops the opponent and gives way for another intellectual excursus about the different layers of speech."

According to the artists, WATSCHENDISKURS is "controlled by microcontrolers, connected to a Director-program."

Byte

Here's another great project from the archives of the Prix Ars Electronica. Created by Christopher Ebener and Uli Winters, Byte puts an absurd spin on the idea of a network attack:

"The purpose of our project is to breed a specialized mouse population for attacking computer networks, which would be able to paralyze these in the briefest amount of time by destroying the cables. . .Little imagination is required to see how easy it would be to have these kinds of animals infiltrate the sensitive centers of information power and the devastating results this infiltration could have. According to the same principle, it would be equally simple to transform other creatures, for instance ants causing short circuits in computers, into dangerous weapons in the information war."

Airacuda

Airacuda is a remote controlled, pneumatically driven fish currently on display at ars electronica:

"The Airacuda moves smoothly and almost noiselessly through the water: In design, shape, and kinetics it follows its biological model.

Electronics and pneumatics are hidden within its waterproof head and control the S-shaped movements of the tail fin via two fluidic muscles. Two further muscles are used for steering.

The fin consists of an alternating traction and pressure edge, which are connected via frames. If an edge is pressurised, the geometrical structure curves automatically against the direction of the influencing force. It sounds complicated, but it is actually a simple principle, with which the fish can display the full swinging power of its fins in the water. This structure is called the Fin Ray Effect."

The Telegarden

Here's a retro project. In 1995, a team of artists, technicians, and gardners built an installation at the ars electronica museum in austria that used a funky new technology called the "World Wide Web". The installation was titled, The Telegarden:

"The TeleGarden is an art installation that allows web users to view and interact with a remote garden filled with living plants. Members can plant, water, and monitor the progress of seedlings via the tender movements of an industrial robot arm."

(via Tom Igoe)

Aram Bartholl: Maps

German artist Adam Bartholl, creator of the First Person Shooter Glasses I blogged earlier, has just premiered a new project called Map, which brings those red Google Maps location markers to life:

The web interface of Google Maps uses small graphical icons to show location related search results on a map in an alphabetical order. On each new search ten red markers (A - J) known from the analogue world find their new position automatically within milliseconds. Interestingly each marker and even the speech bubbles with further information do cast a shadow on the map and satellite image. While zooming in the map the pixel size of the markers on the screen always stay at the same size. But if their size is seen in relation to their environment they shrink while the user does zoom in the map.
This effect corresponds exactly to the phenomenon of Mr. Turtur, the illusionary giant of the children fantasy novel “Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver“ written by Michael Ende.

The size of the rebuilt red Marker in reality corresponds to the size of a marker in the web interface in max zoom factor of the map.

Here's a video of the marker's installation from YouTube:



For further reading, check out the Gizmodo profile on Bartholl.

(via coin-operated)

J.R. Haddock

Artist JR Haddock makes digital art whose concepts are as compelling as its craft is rough. For example his series of "Screenshots":

"a series of drawings from an isometric perspective, in the style of a computer game. The subject of each drawing is the image, or images, that created a popular cultural event. Historical events (like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel) are used interchangeably with fictionalized events (like the picnic scene from The Sound of Music)."

Specifically, Haddock comingles depictions of famous violent events -- often involving real and traumatizing public images of death, like the Columbine Murders (above), the car crash killing Diana Spencer and Dodi Fayed, and the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman -- with movie images from The Godfather, 12 Angry Men, and The Sound of Music that touch on similar subjects: courtrooms, shootings, etc.

This juxtaposition, combined with the imperfect facture of Haddock's recreations and the dated nature of his stylistic referent (how many people under the age of 25 have even ever seen the Leisure Suit Larrys and Kings Quests that these imitate?), makes for a disturbing, confusing, and lasting impression.

Similar things could be said for Haddock's series of Internet Sex Photos, or "ISPs", which consisted of low res images taken from online porn with the figures roughly photoshopped out of them:

Alex Dragulescu

Romanian multimedia artist Alex Dragulescu works largely in the realm of data visualization. Many of his pieces involve the artistic transformation of spam, like my favorite: Spam Architecture (picture above).

"The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures."

High quality prints from Spam Architecture series are available for sale here. Another similar project of his, Extrusions in C Major, takes musical scores as the data to be visualized. Here's the output from Trio C-Major for Piano, Violin, and Cello by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:



But maybe Dragulescu's most compellinng project to date is Blogbot:

"Blogbot is a software agent in development that generates experimental graphic novels based on text harvested from web blogs.

Blogbot crawls the web and takes snapshots of web blogs related to a user-specified theme. Then, based on the harvested text, a dynamic collage of images and strings is generated using a keyword-matching algorithm. Later versions will use computational linguistics approaches to derive meaning from text."

You can "play" the first novel generated by Blogbot here

Super Mario Clouds Tutorial

Tech art pioneer Cory Arcangel has an amazing tutorial on his website describing the process by which he made one of his most famous works: Super Mario Clouds, which consists of a modified version of the Nintendo game, Super Mario Bros. with everything removed except the background clouds.

In the tutorial, Cory provides links to the actual downloadable ROM itself as well as detailed instructions for the soldering/hardware work required to install it. If you've never seen assembly code up close and personal -- or simply never from the inside of a Nintendo game -- here's your chance. It goes something like this:

.inesprg 2 ; 32k program memory
.ineschr 1 ; 8k chr graphics
.inesmir 1 ; standard mirroring
.inesmap 0 ; NROM mapper....aka no mapper...

.org $8000 ; 32 k cartridge

clouds_start: ; include cloud hex file
.dw clouds_start_addr
clouds_start_addr:
.incbin "clouds.hex"

Cory's walkthrough is cogent and clear as well. In fact, the whole "Things I Made" section of his website is a treasure trove for anyone interested in inspiration or practical advice for making this kind of art. Good stuff!

Payphone Warriors

Payphone Warriors is an NYU ITP-style Big Game in the tradition of Pac Manhattan:

"You and your teammates must dash across the blocks around Washington Square Park in a bid control as many payphones as possible. You simply make a call from a payphone to the game system and enter your team number to capture a phone. For each minute your team controls that phone the team scores one point. Grab more phones for more points."

Nice use of the increasingly forgotten, yet omnipresent, technical infrastructure of the payphone network.

First Person Shooter

First Person Shooter is a project by Aram Bartholl, that brings the magic of violent video games in to real life:

"First Person Shooter is the definition for a computer game genre which is played in the first person view while shooting is the main action of the game. A typical element of the game is the virtual arm of the player. Pointing with a weapon to the center of the screen this arm stays in the foreground all the time. The Object First Person Shooter is a card and a do it yourself set. The result of cutting and glueing all parts of FPS is a pair of glasses with the arm and weapon visible from out- and inside."

First Person Shooter on YouTube:




Get the full-sized image to make your own.

Wildlife

Wildlife is an urban art project by Karolina Sobecka:

"At night projections from moving cars are shone on the buildings downtown. Each car projects a video of a wild animal. The animal's movements are programmed to correspond to the speed of the car: as the car moves, the animal runs along it speeding up and slowing down with the car, as the car stops, the animal stops also."

Checkout Sobecka's homepage for other neat projects as well.