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]

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]

Christian Fiebig designed a computer interface that makes suggestions to the designer while he’s working. In his version, the computer follows a structure in the making via a webcam and instantly generates other design suggestions based on any special parameters programmed by the designer.

It’s like having a colleague in your workshop, giving you direct feedback.

Continue reading.... Computer Augmented Crafts [vvvv]

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]

BERG today released details of their concept “printer”, one that together with the “Berg Cloud” service behaves like a physical hub to your digital content. They describe it as:

BERG Cloud is our technology to move the smarts of products onto the internet. We think of it as the nervous system for connected products. Built to run at scale, BERG Cloud could as easily operate the Web-enabled signage of a city block, as the playful home electronics of the future. Little Printer is the first of our family of connected products for the home.

..and in particular the “Little Printer”:

Little Printer holds a compact, inkless, thermal printer. Its zero-configuration wireless connection to the Web (via the Bridge unit, included) lets you place it wherever you have a power outlet. Little Printer is constructed in high-gloss injected moulded plastic and the brushed steel faceplate holds the paper, framing each delivery as it prints. Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper. 

See video below.

Continue reading.... Little Printer [Objects]

DaDa Box by Jifei Ou is an interactive storytelling object. It adopts the idea of “Collage” from Dadaism and allows a person to generate stories by a simple tangible action: shaking. When the box is shaken, a story contained inside switches its order randomly by sentence, and starts playing to the listener.

Continue reading.... DaDa Box [Arduino, Objects]