You are currently browsing the grinding.be archives for February, 2010.
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
via David Forbes
Previously:
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!
A skatepark light angel, created by photographer Ben Matthews, via environmentalgraffiti.
From core77.com:
The Deafinite Style is a concept from Munich-based Designaffairs STUDIO that turns a hearing aid into a piece of jewelry, provided you’re up for a bit of lobe stretching to get started. The main advantage they propose (aside from an instant hipster-grunge-punk look) is the opportunity to embed the TriMic System — a highly effective directional microphone system made from 3 individual microphones — into the plug, helping people who suffer from severe hearing loss.
Via core77.com.
A fun way to browse through your music:
You can play music videos, access information on the artist, song, album, etcetera, and using such information control the flow of the songs. Meta data like popularity and genres control the way the music is displayed, with popular songs in the center, rarer songs emanating outward.
Activating one song or video will reveal a list of possible paths you might take toward other recommended songs, and then there’s the objects.
The objects are what control the music and video. The circle pieces are the speakers (really nice speakers it seems from the video) – wherever you place them on the board, that’s what song plays.
The Rectangle with antenna are the ones that activate the music videos. You can place them both, or just one at a time. There’s a plus object that shows textual information, and a dome that controls the view of the whole situation, allowing you to zoom in or out.
Link and video via yankodesign.com.
Created by Tessa Farmer, fairies barely a centimeter tall massacre insects and use their carcass as adornment.
Link via environmentalgraffiti.com.
From suspiciousminds’ flickr stream, who went through three plans to get the shot:
Meet Château des Anges. A post-mediaeval castle that was once surrounded by an immense park. It belonged to a very noble family of counts. It just had everything: a grapevine, vast orchards, fountains, stables, arable lands for crops and livestock, woods, a lake. Ownership changed quite often and the castle wasn’t maintained as it should be. The last owner left the place in 1970. It is untouched ever since.
…..Plan C
Waiting. For a harsh winter. And ice. I waited 8 months to explore this baby. On one of the coldest winter mornings NeQo and me set off. It was -10°C. There wasn’t a single soul for miles. Just us, this decayed castle, and Mister Winter.
The lake was frozen solid and we didn’t have any difficulties wading through the thorned bush. We arrived at the castle. The backdoor of the terrace was open. Of course it was open. What was the owner thinking? Some schmuck would cross the water – or even better – cross the ice in the event of winter?And there we were. Setting foot in an untouched place that’s been decaying since the seventies. Forsaken. Since long. But captured in our minds. For ever more.
