Is post social media friendship an emotional investment of diminishing returns? It really depends who you ask. Midwest-based designer Colin Pinegar’s recent BFA project Best Friends definitely calls the authenticity of ubiquitous connectivity into question, or at least adds some nuance to qualifying these relationships. Pinegar created a ‘scorecard’ for his Facebook friends that awarded each online connection 1-25 points based off a range of criteria (do I know this person’s phone number? can I recognize this person by their name alone? etc.)

Continue reading.... Best Friends – Casting in wax 451 connections on Facebook [Objects]

The Product, a Berlin-based design studio with a focus on objects, space and interaction, was commissioned by Volkswagen to develop a set of visuals for an interactive musical performance for the premiere of the New Beetle at the 2011 IAA motor show (September 15-25, 2011, Frankfurt am Main). What the client got instead was Soundmachines – a custom-built instrument for performing electronic music by DJing visual patterns on record-sized discs. Honk for ingenuity

Continue reading.... Soundmachines [Arduino, Processing, Objects]

Still Life by Scott Garner is an interactive wall piece that takes traditional still life painting and ads a motion-sensitive frame on a rotating mount.

Years ago I had the idea of a still life painting that wasn’t so still, but could never quite wrap my head around how to build it. After various experiments and explorations, I settled on Unity 3D as the ideal tool to make it happen.

Continue reading.... Still Life [Unity, C, Objects]

One Piece at a Time by Jonathan Brand is a 3D paper version of a 1969 Ford Mustang. Stuck for cash, Jonathan had to sell his Mustang to buy a diamond engagement ring. The sculpture is almost as complete as the original including the body and interior. The details of the car are based more on his memory and a few photographs

Continue reading.... One Piece at a Time [Objects, Scripts]

The City of Lille (FR) commissioned the Rotterdam studio of media artist, architect and 2009 Dutch Design Price winner Daan Roosegaarde to build Lotus Dome (2011-2012), an upcoming living aluminum foil structure that ‘blooms’ in response to touch and warmth. A “futuristic view on the Renaissance”, Lotus Dome merges elements of architecture and nature into an interactive experience. Or, as the artist often refers to his work, “techno-poetry” – boom

Continue reading.... Lotus Dome [Objects]

[Photo: S.T. Heizmann]

What looks like a time-lapse recording of bioluminescent critters roaming the deep sea floor is in fact a swarm of 9 autonomous UV light emitting robots inhabiting a 1 x 2 meter phosphorescent surface. Created by Mey Lean Kronemann, a Berlin-based media artist with an interest in robotics, these lumiBots (2010-2011) tirelessly trace the fading trails of their peers. An endless pursuit that, much like a computational drawing machine, generates glowing patterns of visual complexity out of a simple system.

Continue reading.... lumiBots [Arduino, Objects]

Experimental kite designed by Sash Reading with Ivan Morison from the Studio 10 Arch at the University of Westminster. The kite was fabricated and engineered by Queen and Crawford. The kite features 1700 3d printed connectors, carbon fibre rods and cubenfibre aerospace fabric.

This video below shows the kite’s test flight in Jersey.

Continue reading.... Three Cubes Colliding [Objects]

Last September, GML group launched The GML Field Recorder Challenge. The project was an invitation to artists and hackers to design a DIY hardware and software solution for unobtrusively recording graffiti motion data during a graffiti writer’s normal practice in the city. The winning project would receive 1,200 euros.

Earlier this year, our guest writer and contributor Joshua Noble took on the challenge by creating a custom piece of hardware for recording graffiti tags that costs no more than $170.97 or 126.81 Euros. The setup is simply based around using an optical mouse that knows how it’s being tilted. The ultra-bright LED was installed to ensure that the mouse can read properly off the wall, a combination of special lenses, acrylic cut casing, batteries, SDCard slot, Teensy++ board, and a bunch of wires. Once you have your tagged data saved on the SDCard, it’s easy enough to use it in one of freely available GML processing/openFrameworks apps to visualize or cut templates.

Continue reading.... µtagger Alpha: A GML Field Recorder [c++, Objects]

‘Monolith’ is the latest project from the London based design studio Signal | Noise. The team collaborated with the Swiss design studio Unit for the french luxury label Hermés, and their new flagship store in Geneva. The theme for the evening was the meeting of handcraft and technology and in the first room they created an iPad application which invited guests to leave their hand print on the evening, wheres the second installation, shown here, included a six metre interactive object that allowed visitors to control strips of light passing through it.

Continue reading.... Monolith [vvvv, Objects, Arduino]

Realised by Cheval Vert Studio,  the festival IDILL trophies were created by Charleroi/Danses, La Gaîté Lyrique & Sadler’s Wells.

The team designed ‘seismograms’ objects, like pixels snapshots inspired by the physical movement origins of the festival. Each trophy is related to a prize and his winner, and the shape prize itself is generated by a screenshot of the video.

Continue reading.... IDILL 2011 Trophy [Processing, Objects]