I love whimsical little urban “reality hacks” like this. I wish there were more of these in our daily lives. See if you can spot all of the other street artists featured in the video (listed in the credits in the end). [Via DudeCraft] Artist Aakash Nihalani’s website
UK design collective UnitedVisualArtists created this careful arrangement of lasers, mirrors, beam splitters, and other optical elements to produce a Tron-y room full of intangible furniture as part of an exhibit called Speed of Light. I hope they set up their next display in a church so I can blog it under the headline “Pew-pew-pews.” [via Geekologie]
Here’s a nice mini-documentary on kinetic sculptor/automata-maker Steve Armstrong. The video goes into a fair amount of detail on his design and building process. Motion: The Automata of Steve Armstrong
James over at Cinemassacre undertook to find out how many times you could copy VHS footage before it became completely unwatchable. It’s not exactly a well-controlled experiment: He doesn’t report the equipment he used to do the copying or the kind of tape involved and, somewhat annoyingly, he does not actually report the number of clips he spliced together to make his 3-minute video. Determining at what point the noisy footage is “unwatchable” is also sort of arbitrary. Still, interesting to watch. I personally counted 63 generations before the footage decayed into meaningless audiovisual noise. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]
Italian design studio Carnovsky unveiled this concept wallpaper, overprinted with differently-colored complimentary patterns that can be selectively displayed by shining red, green, or blue light on the surface. I think they should add a special super-secret UV-reactive layer, too. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]
In the late 19th century, when biologists and botanists from Harvard were sailing all over the world taking specimens of every living creature they could find and sending them back home for study, a very serious problem arose in the accurate preservation of those specimens. There was no refrigeration and no practical color photography, and fresh plant and animal specimens rapidly decayed into colorless blobs of mush in jars full of alcohol or formalin. So then-director of the Harvard Botanical museum George L. Goodale commissioned German father-and-son glass artists Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka to create photorealistic replicas of fresh specimens in solid glass. The Blaschkas would go on to spend the next 50 years creating more than 3,000 such models, which are still on display at Harvard today. It’s a thing not to be missed in your time on this Earth.
Tobias Muthesius of Paris, France sent in this installation by French interactive designers Lab212 designed for Morocco’s FICAM animation festival. It was hard for me to scrounge up technical details but it looks like an Arduino and XBee were involved.
