Year: 2011

Martha Stewart Pumpkin Edge Punch

Here’s one of my favorite Halloween craft tools this year in action – this Martha Stewart pumpkin edge punch from her Halloween collection. I found it at my local Michaels and put it good use making my Halloween greeting cards. I’m using some of Martha’s project paper pads, too, to make flat cards. And for […]

Scrap Tanker Car Becomes Giant Steel Mantis

Scrap Tanker Car Becomes Giant Steel Mantis

Bill Secunda’s sculpture “Mantis Dreaming” was inspired by The Verve’s song “Catching The Butterfly.” Of it, he writes: “I imagined a praying mantis might have that dream, his opposite, the butterfly, beautiful, delicate, and always out of reach. He is so infatuated with it, when the butterfly lands on him he stands frozen. His instincts clash with his fascination, all he can do is hope it doesn’t fly away.”

Meet the Pinguino!

Meet the Pinguino!

There’s more than just one 32-bit PIC based “Arduino-compatible” on the block and this one, the Pinguino, is a board that I was pretty interested in – mostly because it’s from a maker (for makers) not a company so much and the efforts towards an open source tool chain. I emailed the designer and maker of this board asking about its history, the differences between their board and the chipKIT Uno32. Keep reading for a fantastic overview with Jean-Pierre Mandon and Tsvetan Usunov.

Zwischenräume Robotically Destroys a Living Room

As the artistic duo RoboCoco, Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders explain:

The installation embeds a group of autonomous robots into the walls of a gallery. They punch holes through the walls to inspect what’s outside, signal each other, and conspire. As if the walls had ears and a hammer to pierce holes for their eyes to see. The work develops a political relationship between the stealthy invasion of digital surveillance and urban combat tactics in which soldiers are instructed to walk through private walls. The installation stages this relationship in the form of an autonomous sculptural process that marks and wounds our environment, leaving behind open scars.