With multiple performances by video hackers LoVid, duels on guitars-turned-game controllers by Modal Kombat, and a handful of other visual delights and audible jams, Signal to Noise is becoming something of a staple for the art-meets-tech community in NYC.
According to the bio on his website, Jólan van der Wiel admires objects which show experimental discovery and are translated into a functional design. His Gravity Stools demonstrate that perfectly. Using a custom magnetic material and a machine with large magnets to stretch the legs off the seat of the stool, he manufactures a product which is “characterized by the freakish and organic shapes that are so typical of nature itself.”
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.”
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.
If you are looking for a subject likely to inflame the hearts of mathematicians, make them slightly weak in the knees, and induce some distinctly poetical sentiments, Klein’s Quartic, first described by German mathematician Felix Klein in 1878, seems like a pretty good bet. Though the surface itself, per Wikipedia, “does not have a (non-trivial) 3-dimensional linear representation,” several prominent math-bloggers have produced models, projections, and plain-language written explanations attempting – and doing a pretty good job of it, IMHO – to communicate their passion for the construct…
Artist Benjamin Carpenter explores interactions between systems in his mechanical kinetic sculpture “Higher”. At Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 he demonstrates the work, consisting of 3 vertically oscillating eyeballs atop springs. The movement is controlled by a single button the user presses which activates the piece’s mechanism.
Did you ever want to upgrade your bread-boarded circuits to something more permanent? Or maybe you’ve got a hankering to make your own metal jewelry? Today we’ll show you how you can do both! With super simple copper etching! Lets go!
