CreativeApplications.Net

The Center for Counter-Productive Robotics – Human-centric approach to automation

Created by Media & Interaction Design students at ECAL during a one week workshop led by Thibault Brevet, The Center for Counter-Productive Robotics is a collection of experiments where a robot was programmed to perform counter-productive tasks, with intention to develop a more human-centric approach to automation and robotics. "In this day and age, robots are presented as the embodiment of precision, speed…

Bit – The demise of chance and the rise of algorithm

Created bu Jonghong Park  at the University of the Arts Bremen (Digital Media Program), the installation ‘bit’ represents a natural random process based on the principle of a Markov chain. Each machine consists of "information" engraved on the read head and an "event" caused by the operation of the motor. Linked together using a Markov chain algorithm, one can predict which of the four…

Manus – Exploring pack behaviours in autonomous robots

Created by Madeline Gannon for the 2018 Annual Meeting of New Champions at the The World Economic Forum, in Tianjin, China, Manus is a set of ten industrial robots that are programmed to behave like a pack of animals. While each robot moves independently, they share the same central brain. So instead of acting in isolation, they have intertwined behaviors that ripple through the group as people walk…

Putting The Pieces Back Together Again – The order of chaos

Created by Ralf Baecker, Putting The Pieces Back Together Again is an artistic investigation and meditation about complex systems and scientific methodology. Consisting of 1250 stepper motors arranged in a two dimensional grid, each motor in the installation moves in a random direction, sometimes intersecting and reversing direction, producing emergent constellations and behaviours. Each motors is equipped with a pointer made from white acrylic…

Weather Thingy – Real time climate sound controller

Created by Adrien Kaeser at ECAL (Media and Interaction Design Unit), Weather Thingy is a custom built sounds controller that uses real time climate-related events to control and modify the settings of musical instruments. The device consists of two main parts, a weather station on a tripod microphone, and a custom built controller connected to the weather station. The station has 3 climate sensors including a rain gauge,…

Connected Tools – Devices that mediate smartphone consumption

Created by Giulio Barresi at ECAL (Media and Interaction Design Unit), Connected Tools is a series of objects that explore alternative rituals that could lead to a more reasonable consumption of mobile technologies. Opposite to software solutions (Apple's iOS 12 update), these hardware devices are designed to create a physical distance between the smartphones and the user. The first tool in the Connected Humans collection is x01 Focus…

Fiberbots – Framework for cooperative (swarm) robotic manufacturing

Created by the team at MIT Media Lab's Meditated Matter Group, Fiberbots is a digital fabrication framework fusing cooperative swarm robotic manufacturing with abilities to generate highly sophisticated material structures. The framework can enable design and digital fabrication of large-scale structures with high spatial resolution leveraging mobile fabrication nodes, or robotic ‘agents’. Some of nature’s most successful organisms collaborate in a swarm fashion. Nature’s…

Face Trade – Art vending machine that trades mugshots for “free” portraits

Face Trade is an Art Vending Machine created by Matthias Dörfelt that dispenses unique prints of computer generated face drawings. Instead of paying with money, buyers trade a mugshot that is taken on the spot in order to be permanently stored in the Ethereum Blockchain, consequently turning the transaction into a semi-permanent Face Swap. With Face Trade Matthias wanted to create a playful tension between…

The chAIr Project – Reversing the role of human and machine in the design process

The chAIr Project is a series of four chairs created using a generative neural network (GAN) trained on a dataset of iconic 20th-century chairs with the goal to “generate a classic”. The results are semi-abstract visual prompts for a human designer who used them as a starting point for actual chair design concepts. The project is a collaboration between Philipp Schmitt, Steffen Weiss, and two neural networks…

Apparatum – Inspired by the Polish Radio Experimental Studio

Created by panGenerator, Apparatum is a custom made apparatus with digital interface that emits purely analogue sound. It is inspired by the heritage of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio – one of the first studios in the world producing electroacoustic music. The installation draws inspirations musically and graphically from the “Symphony – electronic music” – composed by Bogusław Schaeffer. Bogusław Schaeffer conceived his own visual language of symbols…