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Vimeo turned popular internet films into an art exhibition
It was hard to leave Westworld at SXSW, but it had to be done. Thankfully, the show here in Austin is full of other tech-themed places to check out. One of them is Vimeo's "The Decade," an art exhibition that turns popular internet films into immersive experiences. The company says the space, which is located inside a hostel in downtown ATX, was created to celebrate 10 years of its favorite Staff Picks. There are eight different installations total, with each being inspired by some of Vimeo's best videos from the past decade. The documentary Jim Carrey: I needed Color, for instance, was brought to life with a showcase of Carrey's real artwork and his painting boots -- all while the film was playing in the same room, naturally.
Our digital future as a 'Forest of Numbers'
Over the next ten years, we'll see ever-faster chips, artificial intelligence and exponentially more data. Forest of Numbers, an exhibition by architect Emmanuelle Moureaux at the National Art Center of Tokyo (NACT) gives viewers a chance to contemplate that future by gazing into what looks like a never-ending string of digits. Careful observers will also spot two girls and a cat, showing that there's humanity buried somewhere in all the data.
LightRail art installation aims to bring San Francisco together
San Francisco's Market Street cuts through the center of the city, from the Embarcadero to the Castro. It's a microcosm of the highs and lows of not just the city, but the entire Bay Area. From the pageantry of high-end stores to boarded-up shops. Where the homeless sleep on sidewalks in front of the insular offices of tech giants Uber and Twitter. It's the segmented heart of the City by the Bay. Now local art collective Illuminate SF wants to unify the entire street by way of lights that track the public transportation system.
ICYMI: Electric surfboard, '80s video app and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-143496{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-143496, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-143496{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-143496").style.display="none";}catch(e){} Today on In Case You Missed It: If Jaws has kept you out of the ocean, there's another way to experience surfing. Just pay $4,000 for the Onean Electric Surfboard and cruise lakes and rivers instead. And you can re-live the glory days of Saved by the Bell and Zumba pants with an iOS app that turns captured videos into vintage gems. And an art installation lets you sing to it and vibrates back with its own song.
Computer trickery makes these shadows 'dance'
You know how to turn crooked vases into an interesting art installation that remind us of Beauty and the Beast's singing pots and candlesticks? We'd like to say magic, but since we don't live in a Disney movie, the right answer is motion tracking and real-time 3D rendering. The installation's creators, artist Laurent Craste and digital agency Dpt., used a hidden projector to make the vases' shadows dance whenever a viewer swings the lamp above them. Their movements even depend on the lamp's swing, so side-to-side swinging triggers the same animation, while a more circular one also shows the lamp's shadows going in circles. Sadly, you can't see this in person anymore (it was displayed at a festival in Montreal in May), but you can watch the video after the break.
Visualized: 50 shades of Nexus, by ASUS
ASUS is never shy at showing off its creative side. At Taiwan Designers' Week last Sunday, we spotted the company's above art installation dubbed "Palette": a mesmerizing circle of 50 overlapping Nexus 7 back covers, each in its very own shade of color. Interestingly, all of these were actually used in the development process of Google's Nexus 7, which just goes to show the kind of mad dedication ASUS had put into the joint project. But wait, there's more! To match the event's "Flow" theme this year, ASUS decided to also show off parts of the design process that determined the final appearance of its other hero products -- hence the title "Becoming" for the booth's own theme. For instance, much like what the company's lovely Michelle Hsiao showed us on the Engadget Show, the booth again featured a handful of tablet chassis parts and dummies (mainly of PadFone, Zenbook, Transformer Prime and a 7-inch device) at different stages of their development, complemented by a generous selection of colors and finishes. Only this time the designers used some of them to create gradient wall art that we wouldn't mind having at home. Check them out after the break.
Patterned by Nature: it's big, blocky and earth-approved (video)
Quick quiz: which consumes more power, an "energy-efficient" 55-inch LED TV, or the 90-foot "Patterned by Nature" video installation at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences? It's actually a trick question, because the sculpture does eat less power -- just 75 watts -- but then it only has a fraction of the TV's pixels. Each of its 3600 "dots" is in fact a 6-inch glass pane which can vary its transparency, a decidedly more lo-fi approach than similar tech we've seen before, but no less arresting as a result. As the video shows, it combines an eight channel soundtrack with twenty Mario-like animations on its serpentine skin -- ranging from bacteria to flocking geese -- to bring mother nature to the viewer without sapping her energy.
T.I.M. has a taste for passers-by, also fava beans and a nice chianti (video)
Art school -- incubator of tomorrow's next great visionaries, or think tank for the Robot Apocalypse? Sorry folks, but this latest Arduino frankenconcept looks to be working against Team Humanity. Part of Art Institute of Chicago BFA student Daniel Jay Bertner's recent oeuvre, the Tracking Interactive Mechanism (or T.I.M., for short) uses a webcam operating OpenCV to follow gallery-traipsing gawkers' faces, and respond to their movements. Careful, though. T.I.M. here bites, or at least makes virtual attempts to pierce your flesh thanks to a hidden photocell mechanism triggered by a viewer's proximity. There's just one thing Daniel left out of his wall-mounted, predatory cyborg installation -- the requisite Hannibal Lecter soundboard. Jump past the break to see this nightmarish, mixed media concept in motion.
Waste Landscape installation reminds us why CDs weren't that great (video)
For most people, the term "waste landscape" may evoke images of desolate industrial zones, toxic sewage leaks, or Phish concerts. But architect Clémence Eliard and artist Elise Morin took a slightly more digital approach to the concept, constructing their undulating Waste Landscape installation from 65,000 unsold (and unwanted) CDs. To do this, the pair sewed the discs together by hand, before blanketing them over dune-like wire constructions inside the Centquatre -- a Parisian art space that, appropriately enough, was once a funeral home. The result is an array of sloping, shimmering hills that emerge from the floor like disco ball pimples, creating a space that the artists not-so subtly compare to an oil spill. It's a pretty sobering reminder of the environmental fingerprint archaic technologies can leave behind, but Eliard and Morin's story has a happy ending. When the exhibit comes to a close, every single CD will be recycled into polycarbonate. Spin past the break to see a video that'll make you wanna give your iPod a hug.
Solar-powered butterfly chandelier is a fluttering mass of art and light
Look closely at that blue blob up above and you'll realize it's made up of 500 butterflies, each one meticulously cut from photovoltaic cells. The hundreds of insects collect the sun's rays as they flutter around a giant glass bulb that turns into a churning mass of light after dusk. The Virtue of Blue chandelier is a stunning work of art by Dutch designer Jeroen Verhoeven that draws connections between the beauty and power of nature and the importance of sustainable energy... or, you know, just something trippy to stare at while you sip a few cocktails at the Blain|Southern gallery in London. %Gallery-124262%
Robot Partner 2.0 shuffles objects around the table so you don't have to
This is Robot Partner 2.0 by Slovenian artist Stefan Doepner. Recently exhibited at the 2008 ARS Electronica Festival, Robot Partner is billed as a robotic "living table installation." The table can clumsily shuffle objects around itself using an undisclosed technology (magnets, perhaps?) and is intended to showcase the "absurdity" of "service-automation." We're not entirely sure what that means, but you can see for yourself after the break.[Via Make]
Liquid Space project promises to make art react to you
Dutch art group Studio Roosegaarde is no stranger to interactive art installations, but it looks to really be upping its game with its latest project, which promises to change its form in response to human sounds and motion, assuming it doesn't blind them first. To do that, the installation will apparently make use of an array of tubes, sensors, LEDs and unspecified embedded electronics and "mechanisms," along with some software that will let the light show "evolve" its behavior over time. There's no word as to where you might be able to leave your mark on it just yet, however, although the studio says it'll be ready by the end of the year.[Via MAKE:Blog]
Talking lamp declares "I am not a bomb"
Installation artists / DIY'ers Rebecca Stern and Rees Shad came up with an intriguing response to a certain January 2007 Aqua Teen Hunger Force-related bomb scare in Boston you may have heard of -- talking lamps that innocently declare, "I am not a bomb". The lights, based on common solar powered garden lamp shells, contain temperature sensors and sound playback circuitry, and trigger automatically depending on air temperature, repeating the aforementioned phrase in one of twelve languages while flickering with varying intensity. No word yet on whether the city of Boston will implement these in high-paranoia areas. To see the whole process, check the video after the break.[Via MAKE]
"Touch" interactive installation lights up Brussels' Dexia Tower
Those who think that everything is better with LEDs may want to pay a visit to Brussels sometime within in the next couple of weeks, where you can currently catch the "Touch" interactive art installation by LAb[au] that's bathing the city's Dexia Tower in multi-colored blinkin' lights. More specifically, all 4,200 of the tower's windows has been outfitted with RGB LED bars (besting the M-INT Kobe building's 2,800 blue LEDs), which can be flipped on and off or changed color at will (click though to the live video stream to see it in action). What's more, the entire light show is controllable via a series of touch screens at the base of the tower although, sadly, it seems they haven't thought to rig it up with an emulator for some scarily life-sized Space Invaders action (certainly not out of the question, given some other projects we've seen). Those planning on checking it out shouldn't hold off too long though, with the whole thing set to be shut off January 15th. [Via Information Aesthetics]
