Yazna and ++, created by Luca Bertini, are two computer virus in love, roaming from one computer to another computer to find each others. Their passage do not damage computers. Their passage is soft, invisible and extremely fragile. They live a few moments in your more instable computer folders, they leave a small sign of their presence and if they don't find each other, they go back. In the event of an actual meeting, maybe their will give birth to a wanderful color dot baby. Feel free to look at their posology.
Yazna and ++
Working on data narratives, Luca Bertini created Nacre, a synthesized creature stubbornly trying to protect itself from unmanageable amounts of data. Interferences and anomalies retrieved from the net are perceived as a hostile external body and thus analyzed and converted into a shield through a frantic, abnormal growth.
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Blog Jouons 
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Virus love
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Your umbrella is your better sword!
As a child I empowered my toys with all kinds of will of their own. We all have one day stood up on a chair pretending it was a boat crossing Niagara Falls. Well Yuichiro Katsumoto did it. He creates objects that become anything you want with noises. By combining common household commodities with computers, Yuichiro Katsumoto works on ubiquitous computing. He created a set of daily objects that give our everyday lives a whimsical spin.
He created Amagatana an umbrella for enjoying a blissful walk after a rain.
Amagatana is a mystical sword for enjoying the blithe feeling after the rain. When you swing Amagatana, you can hear the sound of swords clashing from the headphone. Amagatana seems to be just a plastic umbrella. You also seem just like a cheerful person when you are playing Amagatana. However, the umbrella exists beautifully in your hand as a “sword”. On your way home, Amagatana offers you the world of make-believe. Then, you will be able to get a feel for heroes of comics, cartoon, and video games. It’s your own pleasure, which nobody can notice.
He also created Fula, a muffler for warming the user's body and soul on a cold winter's day. Ordinary mufflers protect our body against the cold by blocking the cold air. However, Fula warms the user by encouraging him to physically move, by fluttering its fabric in a superhero-like manner in response to the user's muscular contractions. Through acting in accordance to the flutter, the user can warm his body, and by seeing the reflection of his heroic self in store windows, his soul as well. Fula can also be used in conjunction with Amagatana, to have the two interact together.
I found this awesome video on Youtube. You gotta watch this video. It is too funny.
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Blog Jouons
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Bicycles can create smoke too!
Keep on Smoking by Michel de Broin
As an alternative to petrol, this custom-made bicycle transforms kinetic energy produced by the cyclist into smoke. The will to power is a renewable energy resource that can be recuperated by a power generator supplying enough electricity to operate a smoke machine. The work is the result of two coupled machines; the one human is productive and the other machine, consumptive. This coupling of machines produces smoke, a waste energy that is liberated freely in the atmosphere.
Video.
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Blog Jouons
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Demoing ideas!
Soon my research lab opens its house! It is reserved to corporate sponsors only, but the Media Lab recently started an initiative opened to the public. The initiative, the LabCAST, highlights projects in their latest stages through videos. I recommend watching them!
One of the lab's primary source of funding comes from more than 60 corporate sponsors whose businesses range from electronics to entertainment, furniture to finance, and toys to telecommunications! So we demo our latest prototypes and research ideas ranging from engineering to social sciences.
"Adventures in Science" illustration by Allan Sanders
A very busy time for us bricoleurs-researchers as we need to put together our latest ideas in a demo-able format. We need to reorganize the demo space, clean the old toys, bring new ones, empty the entire floor, use carpet cleaners, basically make the space looks bright and shiny!
I recently reorganized my research area to bring my projects together, start presenting a story about my line of work. From Psychohaptics a set of haptic garments for health care, to Picture This! a new input device for video capturing and editing! Working on the proposal for my general exams for my PhD I am defining a framework for my research that I hope to present at the open house.
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Blog Jouons
The Placebo Effect + Design Solutions
You are getting better day after day.
I discovered these placebo pills by Broadhong Design on Idealist. The idea is that the more you take the pills, the more the pills get smaller. Each pill has the same effect, the only thing that differs is their size. The psychological effect happens when progressively the tablet-taker transitions from bigger pills to smaller pills. The taker might feel a physiological (mostly psychological) change as in they are getting better as the tablet become smaller. According to the designers, such Placebo effect actually helps patients to recover from physical injuries and psychological trauma.
I also found on the designer' site these intriguing pill-candy. The concept is that each patient has a right on his/her pill information, effect and prescription. Here the pills are wrapped in candy's paper, so the patient can easily recognize the pill's name. Apparently, it also works as a quick way to know what kind of pills they missed from their prescription.
Still implicitly working on the emotional attachment to pills and pharmaceutical treatment, the design team worked on Kisses Pills. You give a present such as kisess pills to your lover who just caught a cold. He/she picks and chooses a kisses pill according to his/her symptom.
Labels: Pink for a nasty cold. Blue for a runny nose. Green for a sore throat. Finally, they can take away the bitterness of the medicine by eating a real chocolate wrapped in silver color!
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Blog Jouons
Saturday, March 15, 2008
These little things in the dark ...
Our childhood was filled with creatures hidden in the dark. The feeling of them existing outside of our imagination was a source of interaction with the physical world, creating places for them to live. Our imaginary friends were sharing our secrets, they were our closest partner in the world discovery. One book that I recommend on the subject is The House of Make-Believe
Children interacting with Kage no Sekai
When I discovered Kage no Sekai, I immediately felt in love with it. The piece projects cute tiny creatures on shadows -and only on shadows- so that anyone can play with them, try to grab them, make them exist in specific places with shadows created just for them, or even trap them (see video of the children interaction with the system).
Photo by the authors of Kage no Sekai
"This device expresses this perspective not by using existing media but in the real world itself. The mechanism is concealed, giving the device the appearance of an ordinary piece of furniture. Although at first glance it looks like a regular wooden table, if you look at the shadows on its surface you'll see the movement of mysterious life forms. When you approach it to have a better look, they sense your presence and hide away. They do not emerge while human shadows are cast over the table, but the life forms hiding within a distant shadow are watching them."
Video
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Blog Jouons
Friday, March 14, 2008
Recycle your equipment!
The power of digital technology fundamentally transforms our lives. Materiality is being technically extended. The digital offers another variety of artifacts that impact remembrance. While expanding our experience, some things also get lost along the path to de-materialization.
For the contextual area of my general exams I research on the attachments to physical, digital and virtual objects. I explore the psychological trade-off between what we call virtual and tangible “attachments”: I focus on people’s attachments to things, and through things, their relations to people (virtual and digital).
I investigate the journey of the physical and digital object being appropriated, collected, hacked, transformed, possessed and shared on virtual environments and communities. I review the hacker’ skills in appropriating objects by transforming it: the Nintendo Wii becomes an umbrella with a map to provide real time directions while on the walk. The Roomba becomes a robotic dog, Guitar Heroe becomes Guitaraoke Revolution a learning system!
A hacked Roomba by Hacking Roomba dot com
With the industrial revolution we lost our ability to intervene on the design of our objects. Even if the old paradigm of mass production has been thrown away, dixit Pine, I believe that Mass Customization only allows few parameters in a product to be customized. There is no appropriation of the object as in the artisan-customer relationship. That is what came to mind while I was repairing my old mac, I had so much fun opening the machine, looking for tutorial and guides, ordering missing parts just to give a life to this machine.
A bit of nostalgia maybe, but recycling and reusing laptop parts, computer parts, and any objects in general would not only be good for the environment but also recreate this sense of ownership through creative use and appropriation. That is why I am so fascinated by hackers, custom car designers and also collectors. Everything could be recycled, reused, repaired, reinvented and investigated!
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Blog Jouons
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The Environmental Health Clinic
Dr. Natalie Jeremijenko, my favorite artist engineer, came to our lab to share with us her latest research. I had the chance to work closely with her in Ireland for the Save the Robots summer exhibition so I was already familiar with her past work. She presented her new work, the health clinic, a clinic to which you can go to discuss your environmental health concerns.
Natalie with her robot-talkative duck
The Environmental Health Clinic develops and prescribes locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable and mediagenic evidence and coordinating diverse projects to effective material change.
The clinic works like this. You make an appointment, just like you would at a traditional health clinic, to talk about your particular environmental health concerns. What differs is that you walk out with a prescription not for pharmaceuticals but for actions: local data collection and urban interventions directed at understanding and improving your environmental health; plus referrals, not to medical specialists but to specific art, design and participatory projects, local environmental organizations and local government or civil society groups: organizations that can use the data and actions prescribed as legitimate forms of participation to promote social change.
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Blog Jouons
SMS stamps!
Disappointed by the fact that there’s no way to save the humorous, strange or loving text messages that we send and receive – and that ultimately they have to be erased – Martin Frostner & Johanna Lewengard came up with a novel method by which they could be retained. 
By designing a series of rubber-stamps, the designers allowed the best messages to be stamped anywhere, perhaps to be used again with the postman as courier this time!
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Blog Jouons
