Rodney Brooks (born December 30, 1954, in Adelaide, Australia) has had an impact on robotics and AI matched by few. And there is probably no one who’s had a bigger impact on viable commercial robotics. In the 1970s, when everybody else was obsessed with complex AI-driven, map-building robots, Brooks shocked the AI community by creating […]
Stewart Brand changed my life. Several times. When I was 16 years old, I got a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog and I was never the same. Through it, I discovered Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, whole systems thinking, nomadics, and the general, revolutionary notion (now commonplace in our wired info-age) that an individual could […]
Years ago, I published an art and early cyberculture zine, called Going Gaga. I did an issue devoted to doodling. I’m fascinated by doodles, scribbles, “crazy walls” (those string-connected, associative wall collages that Hollywood serial killers and the cops who pursue them all seem to need), and all forms of loose-brained/non-linear thinking. The very precise […]
Most people probably think of William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) as a slightly whack-a-doodle British poet and painter. But he was so much more than that. He was a slightly whack-a-doodle British craftsman, inventor, engraver, printer, and self-publisher, among many other things. Blake believed that every human being had a “poetic […]
Polyhedra lovers are fond of certain compound shapes, such as this symmetric arrangement of five concentric regular tetrahedra. If you like to make things in wood, it’s a natural challenge to cut some plywood, bevel the edges, and screw or glue together a giant geometric model. Here is Dale Seymour with his compound of five […]
What do you do when all of the megabytes, megahertz, and megapixels over-complicate holiday shopping for the beloved nerds on your list? Let’s take a look back in time at some classic inventions that still stand up to the year 2010. The following rundown includes a number of fun gift items to accommodate most budgets, […]
AIGA Detroit’s Colleen Hill offers her perspective on collecting postcards as well as a little bit of history on this popular piece of mail. AIGA Detroit is currently hosting a postcard design competition, “Wish You Were Here,” asking artists to reflect what Detroit and Michigan mean to them.
