Category Archives: Technology

AirBurr, Autonomous Flying Robot

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Robots capa­ble of flight in cramped and clut­tered envi­ron­ments have many advan­tages over their ground-based coun­ter­parts, but most cur­rent sys­tems suf­fer from the same fun­da­men­tal prob­lem: any con­tact with obsta­cles has cat­a­strophic, mission-ending results. What if instead of avoid­ing col­li­sions, a fly­ing robot can become robust to them, and even take advan­tage of con­tact with its environment?

Meet the Air­Burr, an autonomous fly­ing robot specif­i­cally designed for mis­sions in dif­fi­cult, con­fined envi­ron­ments under total dark­ness. Air­burr is inspired b the sim­ple nav­i­ga­tion strat­egy that insects use to fol­low – It fol­lows a path and if it col­lides, it has an excel­lent abil­ity to recover.

In this video the Air­Burr nav­i­gates a cor­ri­dor and a nar­row door­way towards a light source using the sig­nals from 4 sim­ple pho­to­di­odes. This strat­egy is par­tic­u­larly adapted to fol­low­ing faint sig­nals in unstruc­tured, clut­tered envi­ron­ments, such as gas leaks in col­lapsed indus­trial plants. The Air­Burr is then pro­grammed to explore a small room using a ran­dom direc­tion algo­rithm sim­i­lar to the one used by most robotic vac­uum clean­ers. This explo­ration strat­egy is use­ful in sit­u­a­tions where other sen­sors can­not be used. It is demon­strated through a flight in a com­pletely dark room where vision-based nav­i­ga­tion isn’t pos­si­ble, and can also be used in smoke-filled envi­ron­ments where laser scan­ners have trou­ble func­tion­ing correctly.


Sou Fujimoto’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013

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The Ser­pen­tine Gallery Pavil­ion 2013 will be designed by multi award-winning Japan­ese archi­tect Sou Fuji­moto. He is the thir­teenth and, at 41, youngest archi­tect to accept the invi­ta­tion to design a tem­po­rary struc­ture for the Ser­pen­tine Gallery. The most ambi­tious archi­tec­tural pro­gramme of its kind world­wide, the Serpentine’s annual Pavil­ion com­mis­sion is one of the most antic­i­pated announce­ments on the cul­tural cal­en­dar. Past Pavil­ions have included designs by Her­zog & de Meu­ron and Ai Wei­wei (2012), Frank Gehry (2008), the late Oscar Niemeyer (2003) and Zaha Hadid, who designed the inau­gural struc­ture in 2000.

Widely acknowl­edged as one of the most impor­tant archi­tects com­ing to promi­nence world­wide, Sou Fuji­moto is the lead­ing light of an excit­ing gen­er­a­tion of artists who are re-inventing our rela­tion­ship with the built envi­ron­ment. Inspired by organic struc­tures, such as the for­est, the nest and the cave, Fujimoto’s sig­na­ture build­ings inhabit a space between nature and arti­fi­cial­ity. Fuji­moto has com­pleted the major­ity of his build­ings in Japan, with com­mis­sions rang­ing from the domes­tic, such as Final Wooden House, T House and House N, to the insti­tu­tional, such as the Musashino Art Museum and Library at Musashino Art University.

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Occu­py­ing some 350 square-metres of lawn in front of the Ser­pen­tine Gallery, Sou Fujimoto’s del­i­cate, lat­ticed struc­ture of 20mm steel poles will have a light­weight and semi-transparent appear­ance that will allow it to blend, cloud-like, into the land­scape and against the clas­si­cal back­drop of the Gallery’s colon­naded East wing. Designed as a flex­i­ble, multi-purpose social space — with a café sited inside — vis­i­tors will be encour­aged to enter and inter­act with the Pavil­ion in dif­fer­ent ways through­out its four-month tenure in London’s Kens­ing­ton Gardens.

Describ­ing his design con­cept, Sou Fuji­moto said: “The del­i­cate qual­ity of the struc­ture, enhanced by its semi-transparency, will cre­ate a geo­met­ric, cloud-like form, as if it were mist ris­ing from the undu­la­tions of the park. From cer­tain van­tage points, the Pavil­ion will appear to merge with the clas­si­cal struc­ture of the Ser­pen­tine Gallery, with vis­i­tors sus­pended in space.”


The Pirate Bay Leaves Sweden

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The Pirate Bay will no longer be hosted by the Swedish Pirate Party, due to mount­ing legal pres­sure from a domes­tic anti-piracy group rep­re­sent­ing the enter­tain­ment indus­try. Accord­ing to Tor­rent­F­reak, the file-sharing site will now be hosted with sup­port from the pirate par­ties in Nor­way and Spain, where it may find more favor­able legal environments.

In Octo­ber, the Pirate Bay relo­cated its oper­a­tions to the cloud as part of an effort to evade police raids and the loca­tion of its head­quar­ters remains unknown, though it has con­tin­ued to use web host­ing ser­vices pro­vided by the Swedish Pirate Party. Ear­lier this month, how­ever, the Pirate Party was threat­ened with a law­suit from Sweden’s Rights Alliance, which rep­re­sents the movie and music indus­tries. The Rights Alliance gave the pirates until Feb­ru­ary 26th to cut ties with the Pirate Bay, forc­ing the site to come up with a backup plan.

Ear­lier today, the Pirate Bay finally cut ties with its Swedish allies, and shifted its web host­ing ser­vices to Nor­way and Spain. “TPB did of course have lots of backup tran­sit lined up for ages. This is how­ever the first time we are going to show two at the same time,” The Pirate Bay’s Winona told Tor­rent­F­reak. “It will be inter­est­ing to see who is now blamed for host­ing TPB. In the end, maybe the anti-interneterians will under­stand that they can’t win a fight when they have the peo­ple against them.”

The organization’s choice of relo­ca­tion was likely informed by legal prece­dent in each coun­try. In 2010, enter­tain­ment indus­try groups failed to force a Nor­we­gian ISP to block the Pirate Bay, while Span­ish courts have thus far been reluc­tant to take action against file-sharing sites, on the grounds that link­ing to other plat­forms is not a valid basis for copy­right liability.


3Doodler: The World’s First 3D Printing Pen

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Have you ever just wished you could lift your pen off the paper and see your draw­ing become a real three dimen­sional object?

3Doodler is the world’s first 3D Print­ing Pen. Using ABS plas­tic (the mate­r­ial used by many 3D print­ers), 3Doodler draws in the air or on sur­faces. It’s com­pact and easy to use, and requires no soft­ware or com­put­ers. You just plug it into a power socket and can start draw­ing any­thing within min­utes. Oh, and it’s also the most afford­able way to 3D print… by a looong way!

As 3Doodler draws, it extrudes heated plas­tic, which quickly cools and solid­i­fies into a strong sta­ble struc­ture. This allows you to build an infi­nite vari­ety of shapes and items with ease! Most peo­ple will instantly be able to trace objects on paper, and after only a few hours of prac­tice you will be able to make far more intri­cate objects.

Check out 3Doodler: The World’s First 3D Print­ing Pen on their Kick­starter page.


1922 Kodachrome Test Footage

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This clip is a very early, full-color Kodachrome film made by Kodak in 1922 to test new film stock and color pro­cess­ing. It is a lovely lit­tle four-and-a-half min­utes of pretty actresses ges­tur­ing for the cam­era. The color and light­ing are exquisite—all warm reds with flat­ter­ing highlights—making it a purely enjoy­able thing to watch.

In 1922, for all its tech­ni­cal achieve­ments, Kodak hadn’t yet done away with the flicker that gave movies one of their ear­li­est and most endur­ing nick­names: the “flicks.” The flicker resulted from vari­a­tions in film speed pro­duced by the slow, hand-cranked cam­eras of the time and by vari­a­tions in the den­sity of the film itself.

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Even more inter­est­ing to a mod­ern viewer are the women’s ges­tures. They act out flut­tery, inno­cent mod­esty; warm mater­nal love; and in the longest sequence, sexy, puckered-lip vamp­ing. Their open expres­sions of feel­ing and the par­tic­u­lar way they move their hands and tilt their heads, even more than the fash­ions of their clothes and makeup, imme­di­ately mark them as women of the inter­war period. Recently a Russ­ian film scholar, Oksana Bul­gakowa, has shown how var­i­ous feel­ings and mean­ings were coded in the ges­tures of early film actors. Some of these are so unfa­mil­iar now, they seem like a for­eign language.

Today, when we watch a TV show or a movie, we see a wide range of act­ing styles and behav­iors. A hun­dred years from now, which ones will be seen as defin­ing our age?


We live in a cut and paste world — Hacking manual

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“We live in a cut and paste world: Control-C and Control-V give us the free­dom to rearrange words, pic­tures, video and sound to trans­form any old thing into our new thing
with tremen­dous ease and power.”

That is accord­ing to Nico­las Collins, com­poser of elec­tronic music and pio­neer in the use of micro­com­put­ers in live per­for­mance. He uses ‘home-made’ elec­tronic cir­cuitry, radio, found sound mate­r­ial, and trans­formed musi­cal instruments.

He wrote the book “Hand­made Elec­tronic Music: The Art of Hard­ware Hack­ing.”  “Assum­ing no tech­ni­cal back­ground what­so­ever, the book car­ries the reader through a series of sound-producing elec­tronic con­struc­tion projects, from mak­ing sim­ple con­tact micro­phones, to trans­form­ing cheap elec­tronic toys into playable instru­ments, to design­ing cir­cuits from scratch. ”

You can get a taste of some great infor­ma­tion on this mat­ter by click­ing on the above image for the PDF of “Hard­ware Hack­ing,” a com­pi­la­tion of class hand­outs from Nicola’s classes at Depart­ment of Sound at The School of the Art Insti­tute of Chicago.

Nico­las Collins is a sound-tinkerer, who makes almost every elec­tri­cal device an instrument. I invite you to go to his web­site where he has a bunch of more great mate­r­ial like Hack­ing Work­shops, Video Tuto­ri­als and Audio Exam­ples.

Take a look at the fol­low­ing video which is a com­pi­la­tion of moments of some of his hard­ware hack­ing workshops.


Watch TPB AFK

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It’s the day before the trial starts. Fredrik packs a com­puter into a rusty old Volvo. Along with his Pirate Bay co-founders, he faces $13 mil­lion in dam­age claims to Hol­ly­wood in a copy­right infringe­ment case.

Fredrik is on his way to install a new com­puter in the secret server hall. This is where the world’s largest file shar­ing site is hidden.

When the hacker prodigy Got­tfrid, the inter­net activist Peter and the net­work nerd Fredrik are found guilty, they are con­fronted with the real­ity of life offline – away from keyboard.

But deep down in dark data cen­tres, clan­des­tine com­put­ers qui­etly con­tinue to dupli­cate files.


TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard, Worldwide Premiere On Friday 8th

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Two years in the mak­ing, TPB AFK is a doc­u­men­tary about three com­puter addicts who rev­o­lu­tion­ized the world of media dis­tri­b­u­tion with their hobby home­page. How did Tiamo, a beer crazy hard­ware fanatic, Brokep a tree hug­ging eco activist and Anakata, a para­noid cyber lib­er­tar­ian, get the White House to threaten the Swedish gov­ern­ment with trade sanc­tions? TPB AFK explores what Hollywood’s most hated pirates go through on a per­sonal level.

It’s the day before the trial starts. Fredrik packs a com­puter into a rusty old Volvo. Along with his Pirate Bay co-founders, he faces $13 mil­lion in dam­age claims to Hol­ly­wood in a copy­right infringe­ment case. Fredrik is on his way to install a new com­puter in the secret server hall. This is where the world’s largest file shar­ing site is hidden.

When the hacker prodigy Got­tfrid, the inter­net activist Peter and the net­work nerd Fredrik are found guilty, they are con­fronted with the real­ity of life offline – away from key­board. But deep down in dark data cen­tres, clan­des­tine com­put­ers qui­etly con­tinue to dupli­cate files.

‘As much as I am cel­e­brat­ing the upcom­ing release of the film, it is a time of mixed emo­tions for me. When I started film­ing this project in 2008 I had no idea the launch of the film would sync with my main char­ac­ters’ prison sen­tences. They gave me access to their pri­vate lives but won’t be able to share the pre­miere with me.

Anakata is cur­rently serv­ing his prison sen­tence and Peter and Fredrik are wanted. The trial against TPB is proof that the issue around copy­right has not been solved. I hope their story will re-spark the con­ver­sa­tion around civil rights in the dig­i­tal age – beyond the so called Con­tent indus­tries. Let’s work together to find fair solu­tions to both keep the inter­net open while pro­tect­ing everyone’s rights in the dig­i­tal age.’

Please join us for the world pre­miere on Fri­day 8th and share the film as much as you can!


Molecule Synth

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I love DIY projects, though I hardly ever fin­ish any one I start; but cir­cuit bend­ing and out of the ordi­nary elec­tronic instru­ments fas­ci­nate me. We have posted in the past arti­cles about Leo Theremin, Clara Rock­more, 8 bit music and glitch, also a hack­ing man­ual with links to work­shops to cre­ate elec­tronic musi­cal devices.

This time a want to intro­duce you to a project by Travis Feld­man, an edu­ca­tor, inven­tor, and musi­cian. He cre­ates art­ful hand­made elec­tronic devices, and has been mak­ing elec­tronic musi­cal instru­ments and mod­i­fy­ing his own home stu­dio record­ing gear since 1999. He has taught courses on games, ani­ma­tion art, and lit­er­a­ture at the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton, Lewis & Clark Col­lege, and the Pem­broke Hill School.

Now he has decided to leave his lit­er­a­ture teach­ing life for some­thing much closer to his per­sonal pas­sion: cre­ate elec­tronic musi­cal instru­ments. He is the cre­ator of Mol­e­cule Synth.

The Mol­e­cule Synth is a unique, utterly new kind of musi­cal instru­ment. It offers the ele­men­tal com­po­nents of a tra­di­tional key­board syn­the­sizer — a speaker & amp, a sound gen­er­a­tor, and a pitch con­troller — but presents those ele­ments as pieces that you arrange (and rearrange!) in var­i­ous com­bi­na­tions to cre­ate your own musi­cal device. The Mol­e­cule Synth is designed to be intu­itive to use: each of its hexag­o­nal pieces is color-coded to indi­cate what that piece is and does, and each piece is marked to show how it con­nects to other pieces. With these build­ing blocks, you choose how to con­fig­ure your instru­ment, and, later, you can move the pieces and con­fig­ure an entirely new instrument!

Mol­e­cule Synth should become what he describes as the addi­tion of Lego + Synths and Phys­i­cal Elec­tronic… a “wild” synth expe­ri­ence that should enrich if not over­pass whichever sounds that come out of tra­di­tional keyboards.


SWEATSHOPPE: Painting Videos Onto Walls

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The mov­ing image plays tricks on the mind. It is noth­ing more then man-machine made mirage. The way in which we expe­ri­ence video in our daily lives is inher­ently sub­ver­sive, it works towards reas­sur­ing us that objec­tiv­ity is rel­e­vant and that real­ity is imme­di­ate. It tells us that time is real, that we live in a con­crete world, that I am me and you are you and that this is where we are. We want to let you know that this is not true. We want you to know that I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

The extract above is from new media artists Blake Shaw and Bruno Levy (aka SWEATSHOPPE) which make street art with­out any paint. So, where is the fun? Bear with me.

Video paint­ing is a tech­nol­ogy the new media art duo SWEATSHOPPE devel­oped, allow­ing them to cre­ate the illu­sion that they’re paint­ing videos onto walls with elec­tronic paint rollers they built. It works through cus­tom soft­ware they wrote that tracks the posi­tion of the paint rollers and projects video wher­ever they choose to paint — allow­ing them to explore the rela­tion­ship between video, mark mak­ing and archi­tec­ture and cre­ate live video col­lages in real time.

SWEATSHOPPE also recently par­tic­i­pated in the exhi­bi­tion “Ouroboros: The His­tory of the Universe,” together with Ali Hos­saini. Here are some inter­est­ing com­ments from The New York Times arti­cle about the exhibition:

“Ouroboros: The His­tory of the Uni­verse,” a 3-D visual col­lage of vibrat­ing man­dalas, explod­ing galax­ies, astro­nauts and cor­po­rate logos, among much more, on six screens, all in the ser­vice of recon­nect­ing con­scious­ness and cosmos.”

“That would be us, col­lec­tions of space junk, some­how per­ceiv­ing and pon­der­ing the grandios­ity that gave us birth in a sort of intel­lec­tual and emo­tional equiv­a­lent of the snake eat­ing its tail.”

“Ouroboros, as the Greeks called the snake that eats its tail, has from ancient times been a sym­bol of cos­mic unity and self-sufficiency. ”

Take some time to watch one extra video cre­ated by Bruno for Modeselektor’s Debou­ton­ner. Very cool.