GENOMICON

This is cool.

It’s this guy from Berlin, who turns rectangular street things into little building with graffiti stencils

Quite detailed etc…

And sometimes they cover entire blocks

Which is from Weburbanist.com

He’s also done an underground version, which is so cool I can hardly stand it…

Which is also from Weburbanist.com

I like a bit of art me.

There’s a video in the first link of an art exhibition opening with his stuff… I don’t know about exhibition openings… I find them incredibly stressful. “so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse“, as Oscar Wilde once said to me. When I find myself in an exhibition-opening scenario, it becomes clear within about 14 seconds that I have 2 options;

1) to leave immediately
2) to (quickly) get drunk enough to cope with other people

Normally I do the latter. Then I can get into the spirit of things. This involves a quick spin round the walls, looking at the art (“yep, nope, yep, like that, nope, nope, yep, nope nope”), and then I spend the rest of the time seeing if there’s anyone there I’m in love with.

In the video above, I’m in love with this one:

The one in the background etc. You don’t get women like that around here. Small town NZ? Forget it. They only hang out in big cities… in this particular case, looking at art that resembles tiny cities. That’s what I live in. One of those little buildings, trapped etc, in a mundane, circular existence dominated by TV and whatnot. There she is, out there in reality, while I’m trapped in here, pixelated. Looking out through the window of the internet.

Sigh

That bloke in the foreground is a bit annoying. Still… he does provide cover I suppose. Someone to pretend I’m talking to…

… actually I think she’s got that whole Golden-Mean thing going on… yea… check it out…

I knew there had to be a rational explanation for it.

I’ve got to get out of here man.

This is the coolest thing I have ever seen

via

It has 1200 cars.

Scissors made by proper scissor-craftspeople for one half, and CNC prototyped on the other.

Both works of art in their own way… the crafts-person’s ones being superior… but kindof commonplace now I think. We’re kindof used to scissors looking that way… to the extent we don’t really see “finely crafted” any more. It takes 5 years of training to learn to make proper scissors.

More photos in their flicker department

They combine a disruptive technology with a hundreds-of-year-old process of incremental refinement into the one piece. Disruptive technologies always win of course… anything that de-skills people always wins. Bows and Arrows and Crossbows never went away completely… but they became backwaters… to the extent that when Wellington wanted to assemble a corps of longbowmen to use against Napoleon, he couldn’t because it takes a lifetime of practice, and nobody could draw the bows any more. Except the odd weirdo.

I’m quite interested in this concept->completion vs incremental-improvement divide. I’ve been making golden mean calipers…

…for about a year now, and am still learning how to do it. Every week or so I stumble across a new technique that massively improves the product/process. When I first started making these I had to really emphasise the fact that they were hand-made… because they looked it. Not any more… they’re pretty much identical now. There are a couple of things that I would like to improve… but… well, time will tell.

This is me making calipers about a year later – holding the punch in a way that allows me to cut out an entire sub-process. I only found out how to do that a week ago.

I come from a programming background where this sort of thing doesn’t really happen – you’re permanently on a learning-curve so steep it’s overhanging… and if something is “repeatable”, you automate it… so it’s rare to get that constant-tiny-increment-improvement that you get with… craft. Bruce Sterling recently went on about “Passion and Virtuosity”… and I think programming is antithetical to virtuosity. You never really get to practice things to the point where it becomes… music. Programmers sometimes go on about “code being art”, but that’s bullshit. It’s not, and not only is it not, it’s actually antithetical to a key component of what makes high-art, high. And I’ve been programming since the 1970s.

So it’s been quite strange seeing the incremental improvement in making golden mean calipers… and while part of the point of this post is (I think) about the virtues of actually doing stuff by hand, with your hands, over and over again… I will confess that one of the key innovations was to stop trying to make the rivets myself, but to get someone else to make them – with a machine.

So… can/will CNC manufacturing cut this out of the loop? (because it reduces the loop to tinkering in a CAD app)?

Rapid Fabbing essentially turns hardware problems into software problems… that’s what reprap is. It’s a process of codifying incremental improvements, so they all live in the brain of the machine that is created… passing on the knowledge of self-building from parents to children.

Well that’s the theory anyway. From the look of them there’s still a ways to go before “the unpracticed” can assemble a machine identical to one put together by the adepts that are creating the designs… but that is what the reprap process is designed to do.

Still… scissors:

One of my favs from about 3 years ago…

Man’s a genius. Anway – he’s done more:

Just because.

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The whole of the Middle East seems to be kicking off. And Thailand. Iceland has started arresting bankers. People (to put it simply) are sick of being robbed.

(via)

Art. I like art. We should have more of it.

Speaking of which… check this out http://www.inventables.com

That is totally the coolest thing I’ve seen in my life, for the last week or so.

It’s full of brilliant magic shit – although I’m pretty sure that the moisture-sensitive-film is a fish-shape, because that’s the shape it is when it comes out of the christmas crackers that we used to get back in the early 70s.

Most of this stuff is so cool that people would buy it just because it’s cool stuff to have. Utterly unscalable prices though.

Oribotics [the future unfolds] from Matthew Gardiner on Vimeo.

Coming via Ponoko etc… fantastic robo-flowers from Aus, that respond to the presence of people etc, mainly Australians.

People like Julian Assange and Rolf Harris – the latter of which is trending on twitter, then former who isn’t – even though he’s just been arrested and the twittosphere is talking about him even more than it was talking about the Iranian thing a while back when the US state-department asked twitter to delay maintenance-downtime for the good of… what exactly? I seem to remember it being all very worthy, full of lofty ideals etc.

I need to take a day off from this wikileaks stuff. I guess Julian does as well.

You fuckers better be gentle with him because the whole world is watching you… and in the meantime, wikileaks will keep on publishing. We all will. History is not written by victors, it’s written by writers.

Not allowed in pubs etc. It would have to stand about with its mates, outside.

Which is cool, only Adafruit linked to it and generated so much traffic that it’s brought the site down.

Anyway – this dude I think : Kristoffer Myskja

I was expecting there to be some sort of explosion at the end, but there’s no explosion.

Another thing from Julius Von Bismark, who is a god. Or at least he looks like a god. Or a Druid. A Germanic one.

He’s the one that invented the thing for projecting images into other people’s flash photographs, and made a giant average-emoticon in the sky over Berlin. Brilliant.

Anyway, he’s invented this scrolling doodlebot

(via)

which is pretty cool – because it can make pictures bigger than it is. Really really long ones in other words. The sky is the limit. We have nothing to lose but our imaginations.

The only way you could improve on that is have something that could draw and move about… a bit like a more nimble version of these:

Which would obviously escape from the lab and cover the entire world with graffiti, and you’d wake up with doodles all over your face, a bit like the way you wake up covered in snail-trails when you get drunk and go to sleep outside.

I’m not entirely sure what this is, but I think it looks pretty cool

The wheels look a bit silly on a body that wide, but still… excellent. A few (major) tweaks here and there, and you’ve got a winner I think.