Serendipity books made by Asako Matsumoto is an attractive concept interface to enjoy books.
Found on Blankism blog, the blog also links to the annual exhibition 2006 web site for Kyoto City University of Arts, in which a selection of gradute school prizes are presented.
Letter by Domae Hitomi
Monday, February 26, 2007
Kyoto City University of Arts
Saturday, February 24, 2007
The launch of the Distance Lab
The Distance Lab is now opening! The Distance Lab is a new digital media research institute based in the beautiful and culturally-rich north of Scotland.
The mission of Distance Lab is to invent new technologies and experiences that challenge the way we think about distance and help overcome its disadvantages in learning, health care, relationships, culture, and other areas.
Based on the research done at the Media Lab Europe in Dublin, and more specifically in a research group named Human Connectedness, Distance Lab will expand on many of the themes from this group as it develops a similar demo-based culture full of talented engineers, designers, and artists from all over the world.
Distance Lab is now recruiting RAs and interns and if you are interested to apply for a position there, visit the Distance Lab web site
The ones already on board: Dr. Stefan Agamanolis, Matt Karau, Andrea Taylor and Joelle Bitton.
Raw: Joelle Bitton's master piece created with Matt Karau and Stefan Agamanolis at Media Lab Europe
Raw is an audio/photographic tool for conveying minimally-mediated impressions of everyday life. More about Raw
Interaction Design and Children
Jabberstamp? It is for adults to understand that a work of art is not a hat, but a boa digesting an elephant! - Yasmine Abbas
I teamed with Hayes Raffle to work on his Jabberstamp invention.
This is the first time I work on a project on which I am not the inventor. This collaboration is refreshing through the distance allowed by not being the actual initiator. It brings critical insights on the interaction design. Hayes asked me to join him, because of my background in toy design for children, especially the design of toys for emergent literacy. Out of the technology available, I tried to understand what could children do with the simple mechanism of associating sounds to drawings. Hayes and I end up testing the system, improving elements of the design and discussing its contribution. A pilot evaluation with children confirmed our hypothesis about the type of narrative children explore with such technological system.
We submitted a video for Siggraph'07, educator program and Jabberstamp was elected for being demoed and exhibited during the conference, the 5-9 of August 2007, San Diego, California.
A full paper Hayes and I wrote together on Jabberstamp got accepted to the Interaction Design and Children conference. The focus of the conference is on children’s role in the design and evaluation of interactive technologies. So we hope to see you in June 6-8, 2007, Aalborg in Denmark!
Abstract We introduce Jabberstamp, the first tool that allows children to synthesize their drawings and voices. To use Jabberstamp, children create drawings, collages or paintings on normal paper. They press a special rubber stamp onto the page to record sounds into their drawings. When children touch the marks of the stamp with a small trumpet, they can hear the sounds playback, retelling the stories they have created. We describe our design process and analyze the mechanism between the act of drawing and the one of telling, defining interdependencies between the two activities. In a series of studies, children ages 4-8 use Jabberstamp to convey meaning in their drawings. The system allows collaboration among peers at different developmental levels. Jabberstamp compositions reveal children’s narrative styles and their planning strategies. In guided activities, children develop stories by situating sound recording in their drawing, which suggests future opportunities for hybrid voice–visual tools to support children’s emergent literacy.
Jabberstamp is a MIT Media Lab project developed in the Tangible Media Group with Dr Hiroshi Ishii.
News (update)
July 23 07 Digital inspiration by Amit Agarwal.
July 23 07 Article in Discovery Channel by Tracy Staedter.
June 29 07 Article in Digital experience by Jonas Petersen.
Previous post on Jabberstamp.
IDC logo
Friday, February 23, 2007
Marisa Jahn
Artist Marisa Jahn gave a talk at the MIT Media Lab, in the Tangible Media Group.
Her work explores ways to engage people in gaining knowledge, from literacy, to environmental literacy. She designed tools and methods to invite people in a comparative analysis of information and self-reflective process. She collaborates frequently with Steve Shada and Natalie Jeremijenko.
Interested in how human interact and communicate with each others, she designed wearable musical instruments.
video
For her master thesis in the visual studies department at MIT, she designed a game called Set. Elements of the set can be regrouped, labeled and organized and shared within the players.
video
Project most easily understood through direct engagement, boxSET is a game played as an intervention into any existing collection of objects (archives, record albums, a heap of junk—anything). Involving multiple players, some of whom may not have any prior relationship with the objects to be sorted, the game asks players to develop categories that describes a grouping of objects. However, the creation of order occurs simultaneous with disorder: a player may choose to remove an object from another player's collection in order to place it in his/her grouping. This rapid taxonomic metabolism encourages players to narrate out loud (or 'show-and-tell') their categories with the anticipation that it may soon disappear. Further, through taxonomically engaging with different kinds of objects, players become aware of what kinds of objects (data) are better for certain kinds of analyses (formal, textual, psychoanalytic, etc.). As the game evolves, players become aware of the difference in interpretation, the subjectivity of order, and the contingent production of knowledge.
She created throw-n-Sow a new way for people to think about and engage with their environment. Frisbees deposite seeds while in the air...
Throw-n-Sow is a flying disc toy similar to a Frisbee that uses the centripetal force generated in the act of throwing to distribute seeds into the environment. Manufactured as a toy made from environmentally-friendly, biodegradable plastics, Throw-n-Sow consists of a main body and a separate container that slides and locks under the disc. This container contains adjustable holes of different diameter to accommodate variant seed sizes. In other words, Throw-n-Sow is a literally empty container into which individuals and communities emplace selected seeds.
Throw-n-Sow is interactive eco-art project that engages diverse communities in each step of the project (manufacturing, seed-selection, site-selection, plant stewardship, art education), Throw-n-Sow raises questions about the expanded field of drawing, indigenous ecologies vs. selective human cultivation, landscape evolution and succession, ethnobotany, agronomy, etc. Throw-n-Sow ultimately aims to valorize distributive intelligence and interdisciplinary learning.
Throw-n-Sow is the kind of art that literally passes between two or more individuals. Leaving behind a trail of seeds as it sails through the air, Throw-n-Sow essentially imprints moments of play into the landscape. Individuals carrying the Throw-n-Sow disc from one place to another develop an affective relationship to the toy and to the sites in which it is deployed.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
The futures of textile
My friend Jane Harris, the director of the Textile Futures Research Group at Central Saint Martins just invited me to this awesome salon on Textile Futures at the ICA. So if you are in London, you should check it out!
TEXTILE FUTURES SALON (ICA and University of the Arts London collaboration)
20 March 2007, 6-8pm. Textile Futures Research Group, University of the Arts London in collaboration with the ICA presents the Textile Futures Salon. The first in this series of seminars and workshops will ask the question, “What is the Future For Textiles?”. Fashion designer, Katherine Hamnett; founder of the Future Laboratory, Martin Raymond; architect, Ian Ritchie; textiles author and curator, Sarah E.Braddock Clarke; and interaction & textile designer, Rachel Wingfield will be in the hot seat to respond, chaired by Dr Jane Harris, member and director of the Textile Futures Research Group.
Photo © Ian Ritchie
web site
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Nina Katchadourian
Natural Car Alarms
I'm a great believer in misunderstandings as fruitful starting points for art works. Moments of confusion can be incredibly expansive mental spaces, where you hover in a kind of vastness, trying to extend this state as long as possible until some clue provides context, or some bit of information anchors you once again to what's actually going on, delineating and determining what you should be understanding about things. Most people have had the experience of sleeping in an unfamiliar place and for a moment having no idea where you are when you wake up. Standing there in the rainforest was a bit like this: I tried to stay with both interpretations of that sound for as long as I could, but I also made a mental note to remember the error for later.
Multi media artist Nina Katchadourian is interested in communication and intervenes inspired by her disorienting experiences.
Helen Mirra recommended me to look at Natural Car Alarms. Nina Katchadourian describes her experience of walking through the rainforest, feeling disoriented and suddenly hearing a car alarm. The car alarm sound was the one of a bird. She later decided to reproduce this effect in an urban setting and selected shockingly alarm-like and also distinctly still bird-like sounds that will be played by cars in the urban space.
Natural Car Alarms is a project consisting of three cars rigged with modified car alarms whose typical six-tone siren has been replaced with a similar one made only of bird calls. Some of the bird sounds are shockingly electronic in character; others are very bird-like in the quality of their sound, but very alarm-like in their patterning. The idea for the project was in fact the result of a misunderstanding’s heard a bird in the jungles of Trinidad that I mistook for a car alarm—and the project took up the severely urban car alarm as an element that was in fact completely natural to the Long Island City landscape where the piece was exhibited several times in summer and fall of 2002.
In the case of the process of this piece, it is fascinating to me how the disorientation can come from nature and the familiar from the industrial.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Buried
In this project, sensor modules are hidden within snow elements such as rocks, pavements, icy beach. Each sensor module contains pre-recorded chirping birds. Each module is composed of a set of wireless speakers and plays a pre-recorded cardinal bird - Many thanks to Cornell lab of Ornithology for their great collection of free bird sounds.
When a passerby travels through her environment, she observes her surroundings. Hearing birds coming from the snow she declares: “this is lovely”. She does not yet connect the meaning of the two. She is projected within her idealistic view of her environment, snow and birds symbolizing magic.
She tries to obtain her curious information: “I know the sound comes from the ground, but where?” In a few minutes she notices that the sounds come from the snow, and realizes the fact: this is unusual and disorienting.
This project exemplifies the disconnection between natural elements of the outside; the birds symbolizing the spring, the snow symbolizing the winter. The two are reunited in a dramatic way. I shift the location of the birds from the trees to the ground. I shift the seasonal sounds from winter to spring. In this piece I selected a large landscape, nude from anything else than a winter tree, with no leaves, just branches. I bury the sounds into the ground, in the snow.
I find that we are disconnected from reality. Aesthetic endeavors create magic, but magic that distances us from facts. I use this magic in nature, elements that are natural but yet inspire us: snow, sounds of birds. I put them together to create this aestheticised tragedy.
Project I made for the sculpture studio : outside
Saturday, February 17, 2007
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.
Friday, February 16, 2007
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.
sr = 44100
kr = 4410
ksmps = 10
nchnls = 1
instr 1
kamp = 10000
kcps = 220
ifn = 1
a1 oscil kamp, kcps, ifn
out a1
endin
; 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
icon, your piece will play back.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.
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...)
. 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.)
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:
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