Stare off into the distance, watch Heavenside appear….

Photo taken by Derek Olson, link via David Forbes.

Augmented Sculpture by GROSSE8 & LICHTFRONT / Passagen 2010 from Lichtfront on Vimeo.

augmented sculpture is an art installation that combines three-dimensional sculpture and 2-D projections by lichtfront and grosse8. the project was recently presented at imm cologne 2010 where viewers could see the piece in action. the project consists of an abstract geometric form that is spiky and jagged all over. the sculpture itself is white making it the perfect canvas for colourful light projections. an array of digital projectors is beamed onto the form in accordance to the specific shape of the sculpture. the projection can illuminate each facet of the form individually making the sculpture appear to be illuminating from within.

Via designboom.com.

From technabob.com.

From textually.org:
Swedish software developer, The Astonishing Tribe, is testing a iPhone application called Reconiizr that will enable the user to find names and numbers of complete strangers.

The user simply has to take a picture of a person and hit the ‘Recognize’ button.

The photo is then compared to shots on social networking sites including Facebook and Twitter before personal information, which can include phone numbers, addresses and email addresses, is sent to the user.

The app works on phones with a camera of five or more megapixel resolution

Via textually.org.

From we-make-money-not-art.com’s coverage of the Japan Media Arts Festival - The Arts Division.

The artist Wada Ei talks about the Band:

One day, a spectacular picture popped up in my brain. It was an image of abandoned electrical appliances being played as musical instruments on a street in a town. Using this image as a starting point, I set up the same number of tube televisions and PC-controlled video decks correspond to the number of notes in a musical scale to create a set of gamelan percussion instruments. Tapping TV tubes produces primitive and cosmic electrical music.

A short little movie showcasing Tokyo, from pinktentacle.com:

Via scaryideas.com.

At this year’s DICE 2010 Expo, Carnegie Mellon’s Jesse Schell gave a fantastic presentation that starts with why Facebook *shouldn’t* work in the way that it does and extrapolates forward into a half-creepy and half-inspiring vision for the embodied internet, the network of things, the culture of games and the SPIMEworld to come.

From Technology Review:

The UK company Peratech, which last month signed a deal to develop novel pressure-sensing technology for screen maker Nissha, has announced that it will use the same approach to make artificial “skin” for the MIT Media Lab.

Peratech makes an electrically conductive material called quantum tunneling composite (QTC). When the material is compressed electrons jump between two conductors separated by polymer insulating layer covered with metallic nanoparticles. QTC has already been used to make small sensors for NASA’s Robonaut and for a robotic gripper made by Shadow Robot Company.

QTC robot skin could perhaps let a robot know precisely where it has been touched, and with how much pressure. It could also be helpful in designing machines that have better grasping capabilities, and for developing more natural ways for machines to interact with humans.

The company says QTC can be screen-printed as a flexible, robust sheet as thin as 75 microns or made into a coating just 10 microns thick. Because the material reacts only when a force is applied, it consumes little power. And it’s flexibility will let it conform to unique robotic shapes.

First factory robots, then better prosthetics and in the future, whole new sensory organs for posthumans, I say.

(OK, fine, and better sexbots..)

Chris Poole, founder of 4Chan, did a short interview with CNN.

He has some very interesting things to say about online identity and lifestreaming and, well, truth:

He also spoke at the TED 2010 conference. Can’t wait to check that out when it goes online.

Students of Stockholm’s two most prestigious design schools have collaborated to produce these awe-inspiring, full-wearable shoes, 3D printed in polyamid.

Naim Josefi and Souzan Youssouf, of Beckmans & Konstfack respectively, designed and modelled the shoes for Selective Laser Sintering (the one with all the powder and the lasers) and produced five pairs for Naim’s “Melonia” collection, shown during Stockholm Fashion Show earlier this month.

The concept for the shoes call for further exploration in ever-developing rapid prototyping processes. The pair envisage a world in which we could produce and recycle such objects in a closed loop.

Via www.core77.com

(photo credit: Suzannah B. Troy)

Brilliant sign hack up in NYC.  More details from the NYPost:

TrustoCorp, a group of self-proclaimed urban artists, is adorning city poles in trendy neighborhoods like the East Village and Williamsburg with absurdist messages shaped like official street signs.

“Caution. God thinks you are stupid. Notice: Ignoring God is un-American,” warns one metal missive — complete with a hand firing a lightning bolt — attached below a Department of Transportation sign on East 10th Street near First Avenue.

Check out this Flickr pool for many more fine examples of their work.

When Tithi Kutchamuch learned that her dog died a month before she was able to return to her parents’ home, she realized that she wished she could have taken her pet with her everywhere. From there, she developed the idea of a secret friend: jewellery that was part of a pet animal that stayed at home. The jewellery acts as the connection when you are out and completes the sculpture when you are safely home again. Parrot Companion Parrot is the largest piece in the collection and the closest to life size, in order that the connection be made stronger.

Link and words via mocoloco.com.

HP has just unveiled an incredibly ambitious project to create a “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (CeNSE) composed of billions of super sensitive, cheap, and tough sensors. The project involves distributing these sensors throughout the world and using them to gather data that could be used to detect everything from infrastructure collapse to environmental pollutants to climate change and impending earthquakes. From there, the “Internet of Things” and smarter cities are right around the corner.

HP is currently developing its first sensor to be deployed, which is an accelerometer 1,000 times more sensitive than those used in the Wii or the iPhone – it’s capable of detecting motion and vibrations as subtle as a heartbeat. The company also has plans to use nanomaterials to create chemical and biological sensors that are 100 million times more sensitive than current models. Their overall goal is to use advances in sensitivity and nanotech to shrink the size of these devices so that they are small enough to clip onto a mobile telephone.

Once HP has created an array of sensors, the next step is distributing them and making sense of all the data they generate. That’s no easy task, granted that a network of one million sensors running 24 hours a day would create 20 petabytes of data in just six months. HP is taking all that number crunching to task however, and will be harnessing its in-house networking expertise, consulting, and data storage technologies for the project.

Link via inhabitat.com.

From nextnature.net.

If you love futuristic musical madness, then these bizarre charts and mathematically-transformed pieces of sheet music from artist Marco Fusinato will delight you. Think of them as the abstract underpinnings for a movie like Darren Aronofsky’s Pi.

Fusinato brings together avant garde music and art in his work, creating imagery that looks like the results of a mad scientist’s musings on how sound functions. In this series of drawings, called Mass Black Implosion, he’s transformed scores for avant garde works into suggestions for what he calls “free noise,” by changing the order of the notes and suggesting new relationships between them. Basically he’s suggested a way to make something abstract even more abstract. In the process, he’s created charts that are gorgeously strange.

Link via io9.com, which contains a gallery of more fantastic images.

h+ has a great piece written by a genuine Grinder:

I’ve made scalpel incisions in my hands, pushed five-millimeter diameter needles through my skin, and once used a vegetable knife to carve a cavity into the tip of my index finger. I’m an idiot, but I’m an idiot working in the name of progress: I’m Lepht Anonym, scrapheap transhumanist. I work with what I can get

Keep Reading..

via David Forbes

Previously:

• Exploring RFID Implants
• usb memory stick in prosthetic finger
• Rob Spence: emergent EyeBorg

From ~EvidencE~’s photostream.

Previously on Grinding I posted a video of Bruce talking about Gothic High-Tech and Favella Chic in his Reboot 11 closing speech. In it, he mentions he was trying to make concrete his notion of what this next decade might be, something he was calling Atemporality (”it’s steampunk with metaphysics”, he said).

At the recent Transmediale Festival, he’s back to report that all the historical narratives are broken, multi-temporality is the new multi-culturalism and network culture is the new dominant force.

Strap your brains in, take your smart drugs and drink deeply from the fount of knowledge that is Sterling’s mind:

The MikroKopter, as presented by Holger Buss. The many-bladed copter can carry a small camera, and you can build one yourself following the wiki!

Thanks to heresy bob, who sent me the link via twitter!