...Davin Risk, master food sculptor and photographer from Toronto, Canada, is the winner of the Mike Industries “Make a Meatspace Shuffle” creativity competition. Davin’s first entry, made entirely of goat butter, arrived only hours after the contest began and set the pace for a field of over 40 excellent “interpretations of iPod Shuffle as food“. Link.
Fireflies are networked nightlights for a local environment, the jars can be placed in different bedrooms or other spots around a home so people can communicate with one another through simply tapping on the jars. For example, if you tap the jar in your bedroom you will pulse the colored fireflies associated with that jar. The neighboring jars in your home will receive and pulse your taps, record them and then play them back. The neighboring jars can respond with their own tapping and broadcast themselves to the nightlights in the home. Pretty- here’s how to make them. Link.
For the CandyBlog– Ecoist.com offers hand-made handbags designed by Marisa Rey, made from recycled candy wrappers, food packages, and soft drink labels. The bags are excellent, and range in price from $27 (for the coin pouch) to $285 (for the large basket). Plus, whenever one of their bags is sold, those nice folks plant a tree! Link.
Peter Kirn has a great overview of how Chris O’Shea is going open source with his experiments in building tangible interfaces — interactive tables on which moving physical objects (like blocks) create visuals and sound. One obstacle in this technology has been people haven’t been able to refine the techniques; they just create bare-bones proof-of-concept but haven’t been able to build on others’ work. This is really encouraging. Link.
Amazing public space art installation. The tower at the the S/U station has an odd glass cube on the top and the artists decided to give it eyes. The passersby could participate by looking inside the box. Their eyes were then projected onto the glass–front of the tower, making it look like the head of a robot with ever changing and personalized eyes. The project was an attempt to make “street–art that anybody can influence and use playfully.” Link.
Here’s a great guide on making all the cool retroy pixel graphics. “Each separate IPA image is always going too made up of single computer generated blocks, known as pixels. Each pixel is the same size as any other pixel, but it can be any colour you can think of and it can fit together with other pixels, any way you can think of. You can think of a pixel-based image as you can a mosaic in real life that is made up of tiles to form an overall picture”.Link.
This is a pretty neat project from Mauricio Melo (there isn’t a how-to but I think it’ll be easy to replicate) It’s a networked emoticon device. You log onto it through the Internet and let your other significant at home know if something at work or at school has made you happy, sad, so-so, or upset. The devices are connected to the Internet through an Xport controlled by a Microchip that handles the basic communications. A series of switches reciprocally activate four LEDs that light the transparent emoticons. Via WMMNA. Link.
