Pixel-graphic style in a physical display

Snoil is a physical display made by Martin frey that takes advantage of our experience playing with Tetris-like game, in this case the reference is to the classic arcade Snake game. Now it is slightly more complex than that because the fluid is attracted by magnets to create fluid bumps.
Images and animations can be produced in a pixel-graphic style as well as plain pixel-typography.

SnOil has pixel-like graphic features and is physically implemented using electronic components such as electro magnets, controllers, multiplexers, tilt sensors and so forth. Tiles of electro magnets make the system highly scalable. Each magnet has its x and y position. It works like the snake game in the video demo, but this type of interface can definitly go beyond its reference frame.

In the area of materialized pixels, Daniel Rozin creates a series of awesome mechanical mirrors.


Wooden Mirror in Wired Magazine

830 square pieces of wood, 830 servo motors, control electronics, video camera, computer, wood frame.
Size - W 67” x H 80” x D 10” (170cm , 203cm, 25cm). Built in 1999, this is the first mechanical mirror I built. This piece explores the line between digital and physical, using a warm and natural material such as wood to portray the abstract notion of digital pixels. 1999

Video of the interactive wooden mirror


Shiny Balls Mirror

921 hexagonal black-anodized aluminum tube extrusion, 921 chrome-plated plastic balls, 819 motors, control electronics, video camera, computer. Size - W 56" x H 50" x D 20" (142cm, 127cm, 50cm)
The third addition to the mechanical mirror group, Shiny Balls Mirror displays a crisp and clean facade of aluminum and chrome utilizing the jewel-like reflections on its balls to form the reflection of the viewer twice: Once on each ball and once on the entire piece. 2003

Video of the interactive shiny balls mirror


Shiny Balls Mirror - detail

Found on core77.

Tested and approved: Csound is awesome

Adam Boulanger gave Aurelius Prochazka and I a three hours introductory tutorial on csound.

Csound is a programming language -originally witten in C, ref. its name- by Barry Vercoe at MIT Media Lab. Synthesized sounds that come out of csound are elegant and allow anyone with a computer to freely compose sounds. I prefer it to reason for its infinite personal potentials.

Composer Richard Boulanger edited the famous Csound book. BT on the other end revisited csound taught by Dr Boulanger for his Binary Universe album.

Saying that, all I can say is tested and approved and I can share some of the notes I took, as I think it can help anyone start with the Csound software and compose music.

Install the csound environment from sourceforge to install the CsoundLib framework.

If you have a mac, install Mac sound -for some reason Csound 5 did not work on my intel mac-

Open Mac Csound. Save the file that automatically opened.

Any name written in "blue" are called opcode, they are functions and clic " apple + ' " to have the help file of any of these opcode. The help file gives you the usual syntax and examples for each opcode.

A specific rate is defined with k, and a. The rest of the label can be anything descriptive, but the letter 'k' and 'a' will be understood by the system as the rate you want.

you can test out the following. Add to the orchestra window (orc)
sr = 44100
kr = 4410
ksmps = 10
nchnls = 1
instr 1
kamp = 10000
kcps = 220
ifn = 1
a1 oscil kamp, kcps, ifn
out a1
endin

add to the score window (sco)
; Table #1, a sine wave table with a small amount of data.
f 1 0 4096 10 1

; Play Instrument #1, the basic oscillator, for
; two seconds. This should sound relatively rough.
i 1 0 2

e

If you press the icon, your piece will play back.

in the score window (sro) you wrote: "f 1 0 4096 10 1 "
10 is the gene routine number. 4096, a power of two. it drastically changes the sound if 4096 becomes 8!
In file:///Library/Frameworks/CsoundLib.framework/Versions/5.1/Resources/Manual/ScoreGenRef.html
the gene routines are explained.

In the (sro) window you also wrote: "i 1 0 2"
i: means instrument
1: refered to the instrument 1 from the orchestra window
0: start
2: duration in seconds
3: frequency

(then you can add different instruments, that overlap in time or start at different times etc...)

Adam mentioned the indispensable opcodes to try out:
. foscil (A basic frequency modulated oscillator.)
. grain (Generates granular synthesis textures)
. grain2 (Easy-to-use granular synthesis texture generator.)
. soundin (Reads audio data from an external device or stream)
. physical modeling instrument: pluck (Produces a naturally decaying plucked string or drum sound.)

Finally a good key ressource is the first chapter of the Csound book by Dr. Richard Boulanger, Introduction to Sound Design in Csound. It can be downloaded for free from MIT Press. Also the Csound web site community

Good luck!

Graphic design magazines for download

From Blanket magazine

I found on Etienne Mineur's blog an inspiring web site that regroups free&downloadable magazines in .pdf format. Inspiring for its distribution format and also its content. The magazines propose illustrations, graphic design, photography, sometimes articles.

I have selected a few among the a lot i looked at:

LAB MAG includes MIT visual art :)

The Royal Magazine

Cobalt Revolter fashion & stars

Blanket

Candy Culture

Wall Spankers B&W graphics

Poor designers Poor but kewl

Multi Link

Cru-a Awesome urban/graffiti collection

Grafikal

Stirato Includes an illustrated tarots set

Vernissage TV Interviews with artists

DIF MAG fashion

pornoffiti funny fonts

Arriba A bit of everything

Lab Zine Nice mix between graphics & articles

cuemix interviews with DJ's about their music process

Pictre-mag If you use flickr and a camera, this is the way to see your pictures in a nice layout printed format magazine!

Interview in my favorite blog!

For Valentine's day, Régine Debatty offered me an interview in her super blog!

Via We-Make-Money-Not-Art

The influence of biotechnologies

Elio Caccavale is a product and interaction designer who explores the relationship between biotechnologies and our reactions to the "transhuman". He developped a series of toys that symbolize the emergence of biological hybrids.

MyBio bunny, MyBio glowing fish and MyBio jellyfish glow bright green when illuminated with a UV light, demonstrating how scientists have used GFP as a fluorescent indicator for monitoring gene expression in living organisms; MyBio reactor cow shows how cows produce proteins in their milk for pharmaceutical drugs (this is symbolized by the "milk thread" attached to the cow's udders); MyBio goat has a spider web attached to the udders demonstrating one animal making the natural product of another.

As Nicholas Negroponte said in Wired, beyond Digital, 1998: "The decades ahead will be a period of comprehending biotech, mastering nature, and realizing extraterrestrial travel, with DNA computers, microrobots, and nanotechnologies the main characters on the technological stage. Computers as we know them today will a) be boring, and b) disappear into things that are first and foremost something else: smart nails, self-cleaning shirts, driverless cars, therapeutic Barbie dolls, intelligent doorknobs that let the Federal Express man in and Fido out, but not 10 other dogs back in. Computers will be a sweeping yet invisible part of our everyday lives: We'll live in them, wear them, even eat them. A computer a day will keep the doctor away."

Now that the new technological stage described by Nicolas Negroponte is prominent, I study the materiality perceived through these technologies. I believe that this modification of our perception of the environment is developped through our experience with the digital.

Intelligent materials

The company SensiTile has developed a series of interactive materials that respond to motion, light and color. SensiTile proposes translucent polymer, cast concrete, cast resin tiles.

Apparently a lot of designers have started using the material in their concept, such as Zaha Hadid Architects in their winning proposal for Boulevard Der Stars Competition. The tiles are inserted within the pavement which glow and ripple in the day and night against the light and the shadows created by the pedestrians.



Boulevard Der Stars proposal

Touch · Sensitive Apparel at CHI 2007

Touch·Sensitive is a work-in-progress to develop a series of haptic modules that allow computational massage therapy to be diffused, customized and controlled by people on the move. Our current prototypes succeeded in defining a flexible structure, a mechanism of diffusion, and a feedback system for alerting and comforting the user through haptic means.

Touch · Sensitive Apparel work-in-progress 6 pages paper has been accepted to CHI 2007. Come see Yas and I in Saint Jose from April 28-May 3 2007!

Abstract
Touch·Sensitive is a haptic apparel that allows massage therapy to be diffused, customized and controlled by people while on the move. It provides individuals with a sensory cocoon. Made of modular garments, Touch·Sensitive applies personalized stimuli. We present the design process and a series of low fidelity prototypes that lead us to the Touch·Sensitive Apparel.



Download pdf of the paper

Sensory experiences

Today I watched Signers Koffer by Peter Liechti (1995, 81 min.), a movie on action sculptures made by the Swiss artist Roman Signer. Signer uses common household objects sometimes in addition to his own body to create a combination of explosive, compressed and released sculptures. He plays with compression and expansion such as in a harm stretch that gives a sense of pleasure. He works on the ideal speed. He uses his body in extreme conditions to engage in a personal discussion with nature. He borrows activities that use nature, readapt nature, and destroy nature. He re-instantiates the viewer shock that can happen facing consequences of natural catastrophes, and this within his action sculptures. He collects and revisits specific polish toys, toys that are charged with a period, a sense of magic. He describes their form, their functions in relation to their history and sometimes misery.

I had difficulty finding media about his work online, however a german band called Blumentopf borrowed and recompiled visuals of the movie.
Sequences from the Movie.

The sculptural actions of Roman Signer reminds me of the Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.

Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries. And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it's because the poetry or prose we write - devoid of any desire to move anyone else's will or to mould anyone's understandng - is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.

A walk in the Duchamp Outpatient Clinic

Basketball Drawing, 2001, Harlem earth on paper, found suitcase. Bouncing a basketball on this 10 feet tall sheet of paper, covers it with dirt from Harlem.

A little more on David Hammons

David Hammons was born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois. An African-American, he is a conceptual installation artist using his found-object media as a platform for Dadaist social commentary, primarily on racial themes. Hammons places himself as an artist between Arte Povera and Marcel Duchamp. He has risen to prominence while at the same time consciously avoiding the attention of critics, galleries, and museums, preferring to do things in the street.

David Hammons has been inspired by the Arte Povera, Art which is not an impoverished art, but an art with an emphasis on materials and processes. He also thinks the art audience is the worst audience in the word: "it's overly educated, it's conservative, it's out to criticize not to understand, and it never had any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?" - Interview with David Hammons by dept of Modern culture and Media at Brown.

Today I read The Walker by Peter Schjeldahl Rediscovering New York with David Hammons Issue of 2002-12-23 and 30. Having extensively studied in Paris contemporary aesthetics and philosophy of art, at some point in my life I felt a bit brain-washed by this idea that any form of expression must be controlled while 'passion' and 'feeling' should not drive any parts of the conceptual work. Reading this article was refreshing for that reason. I picked my favorite part from the article:

I didn't ask him what it's like being black in a profession that remains overwhelmingly white. But he volunteered, "It's like being a white man in the jazz world, like Chet Baker or Gerry Mulligan. They had confidence. I feed off the confidence of jazz greats like them." He disparaged the academic ironies of younger artists, including blacks, who pose as subversives. He said, "I'm the C.E.O. of the D.O.C.—the Duchamp Outpatient Clinic. We have a vaccine for that smartness virus that's been in the art world for the last fifty years." The cure may be expressive activity that is streetwise, heartfelt, and utterly matter-of-fact.

... so refreshing!

Painting Pixels

The pixel roller, from 2005, is to me another take on how technology influenced the creative process, and in this case the printing process. The combination of digital and a new materiality expressed with the digitial is impressive.

Made by rAndom International at RCA

PixelRoller is a paint roller that paints pixels, designed as a rapid response printing tool specifically to print digital information such as imagery or text onto a great range of surfaces. The content is applied in continuous strokes by the user. PixelRoller can be seen as a handheld “printer”, based around the ergonomics of a paintroller, that lets you create the images by your own hand.

Web Site for PixelRoller including press material and a superbe video!



Pixels are everywhere, from dishes to architectural home structures.
This series from Remake Design reminds me of the Tetris video game.