Open Reel Ensemble, a Japanese experimental music group, plays reel-to-reel tape recorders as musical instruments. Spectacular example of artistic technological misuse.
[via]
Posts Tagged → technology
Visions of Heaven and Hell
“Visions of Heaven and Hell was a three-part documentary broadcast in the UK in 1994, which examined and extrapolated social changes brought about by new technologies, but also touched on wider themes of biotechnology, virtual reality, population density and pandemics.”
Featuring (among others): William Gibson, Stephen Hawking, Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Tilda Swinton, Nick Land.
[via]
The Toaster Project
I just found out about this incredible work called The Toaster Project. In 2009 Thomas Thwaites decided to recreate a mass-produced toaster from scratch. The TED Talk about the project is also great.
“It takes an entire civilization to build a toaster. Designer Thomas Thwaites found out the hard way, by attempting to build one from scratch: mining ore for steel, deriving plastic from oil … it’s frankly amazing he got as far as he got. A parable of our interconnected society, for designers and consumers alike“.
Occasional updates
A really cool website full of old Casio wrist camera photos taken more than 20 years ago:
“It’s an amazing thing that looks just like a normal watch, but has a nifty little built-in digital camera that lets you take lots of photos on the quiet – and then beam them to your computer! Expect occasional updates documenting my travels and drunken nights…“
Sensing, more than reading
Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content: great new article by Caroline Busta.
“But what if, for better or worse, this non-reading mode is a form of adaptation: an evolutionary step in which we’ve learned to scan, like machines, for keywords and other attributes that allow for data-chunking, quickly aligning a piece of content with this or that larger theme or political persuasion? What if, in a time of infinity-content, a meta reading of the shape and feel of content has become a survival skill? The ability to intuit a viable meaning via surface-level qualities—ones that are neither text nor image but a secret third thing—is now essential for negotiating our sprawling information space. Perhaps we’re tapping into a more primal human intelligence.”
Oh, Ballard
One of the dozens incredible predictions by J.G. Ballard. This comes from the 1977 essay “Future of the Future”, published on Vogue.
[via]
The LOL verifier
“The LOL Verifier is a device that sits between your keyboard and your computer and only lets you type “lol” if you’ve truly laughed out loud. Bringing authenticity to the least authentic place: the internet.”
by Brian Moore
Karaoke Torii
Karaoke Torii (2017), by Benoit Maubrey
300 recycled loudspeakers, Bluetooth receivers, microphone, line in, 1 amplifier. A 4-channel speaker system allows the public to express themselves directly via a microphone, a line in or their smart phones and wireless technology.
Commissioned by Kamiyama Artist Residency Program (KAIR) , Japan
12′ x 15′ x 2′ – Also commissioned by the Kobe Biennale 2015
Goodbye 2021
4004
“2021 marks the 50th year since the invention of the 4004 – the world’s first Monolithic CPU and microprocessor. This incredible invention is barely known outside of CPU collector circles, but there’s no reason it should be any less famous than the lightbulb, or the atomic bomb. It was an extraordinary feat of miniaturization which revolutionized computer design and made personal computing a reality. It paved the way for everything in our digital world.”
The Beauty of Degraded Art
“The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to it” – Brian Eno
[via]
Live Fashion Meme
This is the last Chanel runway at the Grand Palais in Paris. Models are dressed like stormtroopers and walk through the corridors of a data centre. Cultural remix is reaching vertiginous heights. This is a new genre: this is a live fashion meme.
Blue Screen Of Death Fashion Collection
Annals of Time Lost
“The conversation surrounding the presentation and archival of new media art has often revolved around the issues facing curators and historians as they struggle to bring older works to newer formats; in Annals of Time Lost, Jon Rafman reframes this responsibility into an opportunity: A COPEX LD75D microfiche reader displays Rafman’s New Age Demanded, a series of busts rendered from 3D models; while a nearby plinth houses a 3D print of a bust from the same series. The conditions of archival anxiety—which has been, on some level, wrongly understood as a passing phase to a future in which Google Glass sees all—become palpable as Rafman reexamines the scale and physicality of archives.”
Jon Rafman
Annals of Time Lost
Future Gallery
Berlin, Germany
[via dismagazine]
deFacebook
Art-O-Meter. Evaluating Art (So You Don’t Have To)
“Art-O-Meter is a device that measures the quality of an art piece. It bases its evaluation on the amount of time that people spend in front of an artwork compared to the total time of exhibition. The measurements are graphically represented by comments and a 5-star rating system.”
Once Upon
Once Upon’ are three important contemporary web sites, recreated with technology and spirit of late 1997, according to the memories of Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied.
(via today and tomorrow)
DataBot Mouse
DataBot Mouse is very interesting experiment by Jan Barth and Roman Grasy:
The mouse is able to communicate three different properties of data. It can show you the weight of files and folders, by braking with different force, according to the file-size. Or you can set a custom weight for files, just like the color marking function in MacOSX. So you can find important files more easily.
The third property, the mouse can show you, is the activity of files and folders. By ‘breathing’ with different intervals, it shows how much a file was opened or how busy a folder has been recently.
(via today and tomorrow)
